FHA Activities

The Federal Health Architecture is a major participant in national health IT issues and it furnishes a federal perspective on health IT initiatives. FHA’s tasks are identified on the basis of their expected contribution to the achievement of the national health IT goals – which will ultimately deliver benefits to the healthcare providers and improve healthcare for consumers.

FHA is making progress toward the goal of interoperable health IT on two fronts – creating standards for data exchange among stakeholders and building operational health information exchanges based on those standards.

Standards
Standards are the bedrock foundation necessary for the interoperable exchange of healthcare related data.  One challenge, however, is that there is an enormous number of standards  in existence, developed by over 70 organizations – some serving particular healthcare needs, such insurance information and other administrative data, or e-prescribing and others addressing more global issues such as the format of messages containing clinical data that might be shared between clinicians on opposite sides of the country. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) promises to save lives by sharing critical clinical information in times of emergency, preventing medical errors, and helping to ensure the continuity of care no matter where a patient is located – and also obviating the need to repeat expensive and uncomfortable tests and procedures. It all begins with standards

FHA supports standards adaptation by taking an active role in championing federal agencies’ participation in standards-development organizations, and in the Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), in order to influence the long-term direction of the healthcare community, to the mutual advantage of all involved. HITSP is responsible for identifying and harmonizing standards for use in the healthcare industry. Bringing to bear the considerable expertise of all federal agencies with a health line of business, FHA ensures that citizens’ interests are well- represented. And finally, the FHA offers a variety of educational programs to the federal agencies, assuring a common understanding of technology standards and procedures necessary for widespread interoperability.

Health Information Exchange Connectivity (CONNECT)
CONNECT is a cross-agency collaboration chartered by FHA’s governance body, which is composed of representatives from more than 20 federal agencies with a health Line of Business. It focuses on providing federal agencies with a reusable gateway to connect them to the emerging Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). The CONNECT initiative articulates a coherent federal strategy to let agencies exchange health information through connectivity to the NHIN.