The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is the United States government's principal agency for protecting the health and wellbeing of all Americans by providing essential health and human services and fostering advances in medicine, public health, and social services.

The HHS uses a federated approach for the development and implementation of its enterprise architecture (EA). HHS’ OCIO brought TIAG on to foster an enterprise-wide secure and trusted environment aligned with the Federal EA.

By analyzing, planning, designing, and implementing a robust EA program; TIAG was able to bring legacy applications, processes, and innovative technology together seamlessly and ensure all processes, people, and software throughout HHS were aligned with their mission and objectives. Working with the OpDivs and StaffDivs, we developed a business architecture that supported their enterprise services and process improvement initiatives, provided analyses and recommendations for segment architecture definitions, and upgraded the HHS EA repository (HEAR) to include customized reporting and dashboards for technical and business users to improve usability of the architecture as a strategic tool for the enterprise.

TIAG helped HHS evolve and align their business strategy and IT infrastructure to the rapidly changing digital transformations happening across medicine, public health, and social services. TIAG’s contributions to the HHS EA program yielded a more robust and sustainable architecture across operations, governance, and technical tool perspectives—resulting in improved efficiencies, interoperability, and data sharing across the enterprise.

The U.S. Army Medical Information Technology Center (USAMITC) is responsible for developing and maintaining a worldwide information management and information technology (IM/IT) system for the DoD, Army Medical Command, and other government entities. The mission of the USAMITC is to utilize rapidly evolving technology to modernize and improve army medicine as we move toward a health care future where IM/IT is tied inextricably with successful patient care.

Before 2005, USAMITC systems architecture had been performed on an ad-hoc basis and was poorly governed. Architecture products were “shelf-ware” and were developed only when required – usually after the system was built. Meeting this challenge would require a forward-looking team with expert architecture skills that was respected enough to be able to effect a culture change within the U.S. Army Medical Department (AMEDD).

To create enterprise architecture models on this scale, we needed to tap into our network of elite system architects who had an in-depth knowledge of AMEDD operations, functions, and systems.

Our team quickly documented systems throughout the DoD architecture framework to fulfill MHS and AMEDD requirements and policies. At the government’s request to become ISO-certified, we trained two members of our team to become ISO internal auditors, ensuring that all architecture products are continuously monitored and of consistently high quality.

The DHA HIT seeks to implement, manage, and sustain an integrated and protected medical information enterprise in order to ensure the right information is accessible to the right customers at the right time and in the right way.

To implement effective, cost-efficient IT services and support vital to the mission, DHA HIT network administrators and enterprise managers needed to identify amalgamated information and business processes and actions across the enterprise.

TIAG conducted extensive architectural analyses to determine how well organizational enterprise information systems supported business functions and whether all systems and functions aligned with the overall enterprise strategy. We then authored and published the agency’s operational architecture guidelines for consolidating the architectures of relevant military services while standardizing business processes across all medical functions.

Our ability to document systems architecture and illuminate the potential impact of relevant actions helped the DHA identify and eliminate HIT system redundancies and functional gaps. We were able to advance DHA’s IM/IT strategy, acquisition decisions, systems development, and business processes for building a more efficient enterprise network, which ultimately led to improved IM/IT governance across the Military Health System.