Federal Health Architecture (FHA)

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Federal Health Architecture Fact Sheet

FHA Membership

Managing Partner: Department of Health & Human Services (HHS); Lead Partners: Department of Defense (DoD), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)
Leadership from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and guidance from the Office of Management Budget (OMB)
Participating Agencies: More than 20 federal agencies that have a healthcare line of business

Progression of Health IT Activities

April 2004: Executive Order 13335 - Widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) by 2014 and established ONC
July 2004: HHS Health IT Summit developed the Framework for Strategic Action: Create a private-public partnership to inform clinical practice, interconnect clinicians, personalize care and improve population health
October 2004: Federal Health Information Exchange gives rise to Bidirectional Health Information Exchange - bi-directional data exchange between VA and DoD
March 2005: Health IT Leadership Panel - Federal government should act as the leader, catalyst, and convener of the nation's health information technology effort
September 2005: American Health Information Community established to provide standardized and secure solutions for lab results, deploy electronic registration and medication histories, deliver anonymized records of healthcare treatments to public health agencies

FHA Value of Alignment with the President's Health IT Goals

Input: FHA leverages federal expertise, coordinates business and technology aspects of the President's health IT plan and routes policy issues to the Health Information Technology Policy Council (HITPC), an HHS-led committee with representation from participating federal agencies.
Implementation: FHA will plan an effective approach for incorporating the products of the private-public processes across federal agencies.
Accountability: FHA supports efforts for developing a coordinated and collaborative, leveraging of resources and achieving economies of scale for agency investments in common architectures, services and technologies aligned with the national health IT strategy.

FHA Plans

Improve Emergency Care for Citizens: Identify the requirements for sharing, accessing and updating healthcare data by first responders and medical providers in times of emergency.
Accelerate Federal Health IT Standardization: Help agencies develop and execute plans for the consistent and comprehensive adoption of national health IT standards.
Improve Federal Health IT Cost-Effectiveness: Identify and enable the implementation of shared services to minimize redundant implementations of common health IT functionality.
Support the Nationwide Health Information Network: Provide a federal perspective on network requirements and identify opportunities to leverage the NHIN to create health IT interoperability between agencies and the private sector.
Reduce the Reporting Burden for Businesses: Identify opportunities to consolidate and standardize health reporting requirements to federal agencies.

FHA Achievements to Date

Developed and adopted over 20 recommendations for health IT standards through the FHA Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) Work Group (standards integrated with national standards efforts, adopted by agencies and incorporated into agency procurements).
Defined better business processes to protect the nation's food supplies while saving money through inter-department cooperation.
Leading the development of the federal perspective on proposed health IT standards, as well as the functional requirements for the Nationwide Health Information Network.
Coordinating the adoption of national health IT standards by agencies, including the development of implementation plans.
Developing requirements for a national standard for electronic health records to be used by emergency responders to improve medical care.

Last revised: August 17, 2006