PopHealth: A Free Tool for Measuring Meaningful Use

Everyone wants to cash in on the Medicare/Medicaid incentives for implementing EHR, but the government wants your Meaningful Use statistics to justify the payment.  A few commercial tools are emerging for this purpose, but the government is offering you one for free.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) contracted with Mitre Corporation to create software that could automatically create and send clinical quality measurement reports that support Stage One of the Meaningful Use initiative. This open-source software, called popHealth, sends the data to the Medicare and Medicaid Incentive Programs. Deployed to the public in 2010, popHealth automatically compiles demographic patient data and is designed for easy integration with existing EHR systems.