Business (LoB) initiative that sunset in September 2019. FHA was designed to bring together the decision makers in federal health IT for inter-agency collaboration -- resulting in effective health information exchange (HIE), enhanced interoperability among federal health IT systems, and efficient coordination of shared services. FHA also supported federal agency adoption of nationally-recognized standards and policies for efficient, secure HIE.
Established as an Office of Management and Budget E-Government LoB in 2004, FHA reached out to more than 20 federal agencies to advance the national agenda for health IT. The three primary initiatives associated with FHA were CONNECT, the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) Health Community of Interest (CoI), and the Federal Health Information Model (FHIM).
CONNECT was an open source software solution that supported health information exchange - both locally and at the national level. CONNECT used Nationwide Health Information Network standards and governance to make sure that health information exchanges were compatible with other exchanges being set up throughout the country. CONNECT artifacts are archived and available to Federal partners on MAX.gov at: https://community.max.gov/x/LTcYaQ.
The NIEM Health Community of Interest was created to ensure that standards were in place to make it possible to share health data efficiently and securely. Information on NIEM in health care is available at: http://niem.github.io/health/.
The FHIM was designed to harmonize information such as terminology and value sets across the federal partner community and with existing standards to meet all the federal partners’ semantic interoperability needs. The FHIM, now known as the Federated Health Information Model, transitioned to The Open Group and can be accessed by going to: www.FHIM.org.
Archived on Jan. 2020