IHE Quality, Research and Public Health
The IHE Quality, Research and Public Health (QRPH) domain addresses the information exchange and electronic health record content standards necessary to share information relevant to quality improvement in patient care, clinical research and public health monitoring.
The QRPH domain was formed in 2007 to address use cases related to repurposing of clinical data for these critical "secondary" uses. Globally there is a need to gather and report on secondary data used in public health, clinical decision support and research to improve the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care delivery.
Clinical, demographic and financial information is routinely gathered and used in the process of providing clinical care. This information has significant value public health agencies for monitoring disease patterns of known clinical processes (including incidence, prevalence and situational awareness) and for identifying new patterns of disease. Such data may be used to develop population analyses and programs for direct outreach and condition management through registries and locally determined appropriate treatment programs or protocols.
Similarly, information about care processes delivered to patients can be used to identify adherence to expected evidence-based clinical care protocols and to assess outcomes and quality of care provided by individual clinicians or groups of clinicians. Much of the data required for quality analysis exists within the clinical patient record and can be repurposed for analysis. The protocols for subsequent management of clinicians and individual patients with respect to quality data are often addressed as performance improvement or disease management initiatives.
Research and clinical trials, likewise, require identification of patterns of clinical presentation to select patients for inclusion (with consent) in research protocols. Subsequent management, follow up and clinical information requirements require infrastructure and high-level content gathering capabilities similar to those required by quality initiatives and public health.
The QRPH domain addresses specifications for patient selection, individual and aggregate date reporting, and privacy and security constraints for re-use of patient information, enabling experts in health quality, research and public health to collaborate and coordinate their activities.
The current sponsors of the QRPH domain are the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), and the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
Information on committee membership and current activities is available on the QRPH wiki page or by contacting the domain secretaries at qrph@ihe.net. Use the links below to download the technical framework and supplement documents published by the the committee, view or subscribe to committee mailing lists (via Google Groups) and view a detailed calendar of committee activities.
