Michael Buck, PhD, just might be the poster boy for Query Health.

ONC’s distributed querying initiative is gearing up to enable physicians and public health officials to ask simple questions against complex and diverse systems spanning geographic regions to get real-time health data in return – and to do so without building the sort of mammoth data warehouse IBM or Oracle would showcase.

“The real value is if you can get it out quickly,” said Buck, the biomedical informatics R&D manager for the NY Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “Six months is way faster than building a data warehouse.”

[See also: NYC to test ONC's Query Health.]

At HIMSS12 in Las Vegas this week, Buck and ONC are spotlighting what the folks behind Query Health consider significant progress by demonstrating a round trip query execution.

Buck points to a real-world query that a public health official might run: How many patients in NYC with diabetes also have high blood pressure?

“For public health, that’s what we need,” Buck said, adding that in New York City he hopes to plug Query Health specifications into as many as 100 EHRs to obtain real-time aggregated “patient data that never leaves” the EHR. “Aggregated data is valuable.”

For instance, the ability to answer a query such as ‘how many patients in the East Village have salmonella?’ could potentially lead public officials to detect, and ideally better control, an outbreak in its early stages.

With that sort of health information as an initial goal, the Query Health team is demonstrating that it can query the i2b2 National Center for Biomedical Computing, translate that data into the National Quality Forum’s newest HQMF (Health Quality Measure Format) and again translate that information into JavaScript, said Rich Elmore, ONC coordinator for Query Health.

“This lays the foundation for a national infrastructure,” Elmore said. And while Elmore added that the demonstration at HIMSS12 is “not yet end-to-end for pilots, the team has made significant progress,” toward a new way of looking at clinical quality – based on better health information. ONC “expects to have initial results back in the second quarter,” Elmore added.

What’s more, Buck said that his team, which is a very early pilot, is working on implementation steps for HIEs, and hopes to deliver those as soon as March. Further down the horizon, Buck intends to create a public-facing health data set. “We got a grant,” he said. “That’s a five-year project.”