Query Health: Interoperability for Population Data

One of our fellow travelers on the ONC’s interoperability journey is Query Health. Like the SMART platform architecture, Query Health defines a standard framework for looking at medical record data. While SMART focuses on a single-patient view of that data, Query Health is designed to ask questions about a broad swath of patients so that clinical quality trends can be observed.

Link to PDF
Journal of Medical Internet Research (article PDF)

In the SMART-enabled i2b2 framework, they can be complementary processes: Query Health gathers a set of patients who meet a clinical researcher’s criteria of interest, and SMART apps then allow the researcher to “zoom in” one patient at a time for further details.

A new article the Journal of Medical Internet Research, entitled “Computing Health Quality Measures Using Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside,” delves into the technical process of translating between the Health Quality Measures Format (HQMF) of Query Health and i2b2’s XML format. The paper’s two authors—Shawn Murphy and Jeffrey Klann—are also on the SMART team.

Stay tuned for Jeff’s future post here on smarthealthit.org, in which he will tell us more about Query Health!