PopHealth
popHealth is a prototype open source software tool that automates population health reporting. popHealth integrates with a healthcare provider's electronic health record (EHR) system to produce summary quality measures on the provider's patient population.
Overview
popHealth was developed from resources provided by the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) within the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC).
popHealth demonstrates how a provider can use the system to submit quality measures or public health data as part of their existing workflow. The transmission of summary quality data is simpler, less data intensive and more scalable, representing an alternative to traditional methods of data analysis and reporting.
popHealth empowers physicians to better understand their patient population and gives them tools to improve the health of their patients by performing their own population care analysis. The software also provides a streamlined mechanism for sending data on summary quality measures from individual providers to public health organizations.
popHealth was released as an open source project on March 1st, 2010 at HIMSS.
Technical Details
popHealth is licensed under an Apache 2.0 open source license. All the popHealth software is freely available for anyone to download, use, modify and/or redistribute. popHealth uses the Ruby on Rails framework, the Java programming language, the open source PostgreSQL database, and several Web 2.0 JavaScript libraries including Scriptaculous and Prototype.
The vast majority of the software supporting popHealth runs atop of the MITRE Corporation's open source Laika project infrastructure. All of the supporting Laika software and source code, is also freely available under an Apache 2.0 open source distribution license.
The popHealth user interface is web-based, and places maintaining an easy and intuitive to use design as a key criteria for the project.
Deployment in the Cloud
popHealth has been deployed in virtual environments using, for example, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform.
External Links
- Office of the National Coordinator of Healthcare Information Technology
- Federal Health Architecture website
- NHIN Direct website
- The Laika open source project website
- The MITRE Corporation website