In addition to the contributions of the federal healthcare agencies to the health informatics standards, these agencies have contributed substantially to demonstrating how these standards should be used in actual healthcare practice by incorporating the various common conventions documented in the standards into current information architectures that support patient care. Click Here to read the notice of  new designated federal use of standards to be used by the federal healthcare agencies. This subsegment describes the individual federal healthcare agency systems and the degree to which they have not only risen to the vision articulated in 1991 by the Institute of Medicine report of that year but also the degree to which the efforts of these agencies can enlighten the use of information technology in reaching the most recent goal articulated by the IOM 2001 report “Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21^st Century” (Ref A12).

This program, originally titled “Government Computer-based Patient Record G-CPR”, is now renamed Federal Healthcare Information Exchange (FHIE) and focused on a common communication architecture. Originally also including the Indian Health Service of the Public Health Service, the FHIE now comprises the IHS, Department of Defense and the Dept of Veteran’s Affairs systems and is part of the federal Consolidated Health Informatics initiative – CHI. Use the above link to learn of the CHI Program.