On Feb. 26, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT began making available open source software that will allow physicians to automatically cull data from their electronic health record systems and create quality reports and analysis on their patients' health care, Government Health IT reports.
The Web-based software, "popHealth," is designed to make it easier for health care provides to submit summary quality data and measures to public health organizations and federal agencies, according to an ONC announcement.
Quality measure reporting by physicians and hospitals is one of the measures for "meaningful use" of health IT that will be used to determine whether health care providers will receive federal incentive payments under the 2009 economic stimulus package.
The software is designed to use Health Level 7's Continuity of Care Document standards, in addition to the Continuity of Care Record standard to pull out quality data from patients' EHRs, ONC said.
The software uses the aggregated report data only when connecting to organizations outside the provider's infrastructure to ensure patient information privacy and security, according to ONC (Mosquera, Government Health IT, 2/26).