Investment Planning and Progress Reporting

The Federal Health Architecture program supports federal efforts to develop and adopt health IT standards, ensuring that agencies can exchange health data with other government agencies (including federal, state, tribal and local government agencies) and with private-sector healthcare organizations.

To this end, FHA provides tools for federal agencies to support investment planning and progress reporting. It helps agencies conduct inventories of their health-related systems, create a contract/agreement renewal inventory, put together implementation plans based on accepted standards and report compliance with those standards. FHA further provides support for agencies as they:

• Adopt standards language in applicable IT contracts
• Create plans to meet certification criteria
• Ensure independent validation of software
• Provide a price and quality measurement inventory and timeline
• Demonstrate progress toward making additional price and quality measurements available

With FHA assistance, federal agencies with a healthcare Line of Business can ensure that their investments align with the National Health IT Agenda. To expedite the process, FHA created valuable investment-planning and reporting tools for use throughout the federal government. These include:

• The Federal Health Investment Planning and Information Reporting Guide: This document offers guidance for agencies to advance the National Health IT Agenda through their investment planning and reporting efforts. It identifies reporting requirements and milestones, timelines, processes and tools. Specific requirements discussed within the guide are: the Health Information (HI) Scorecard, the HI Survey and the E-Gov scorecard.
• Investment Planning and Information Reporting Educational Sessions: FHA provides educational sessions on investment planning and reporting requirements, including detailed information about what is expected of agencies. The sessions also offer a forum for course participants to ask questions of experts in the areas of health information reporting and investment planning.