Cohort Builder for Healthcare Quality Assurance and Comparative Health Effectiveness Research

The goal of this project is to field an easy-to-use but highly capable cohort builder, integrated with Military Health System (MHS) data resources, that will enable clinicians, nurses and QA personnel to efficiently conduct clinical quality assurance and comparative effectiveness research studies, and to identify groups of chronically ill patients for whom there are opportunities for care remediation. Such a tool must effectively bridge the substantial gap between the end user"s formulation of a problem and the underlying computations required to provide an epidemiologically valid answer. A promising approach may be to create a graphical"data flow"environment which allows users to build up complex cohort definitions by composition from a set of familiar and easy-to-understand building blocks. Phase 1 will explore the feasibility of this approach by evaluating existing GOTS/COTS products, creating a prototype user interface, rounding out the list of required and desirable features, and planning for Phase 2. Commonwealth Informatics has assembled collaborators from Harvard Medical School Department of Population Medicine, Cleveland MetroHealth System, University of Maryland"s Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), and Stottler Henke Associates. Phase 1 deliverables include requirements and design documents, an implementation plan, and a comprehensive discussion of the relevant issues.