Health Systems Integration
and Interoperability
ICF International provides systems integration and interoperability services for clients
that add new functionality to existing systems. Budget and time constraints
can make upgrading a legacy information system unfeasible. ICF builds new
systems on top of existing systems, leveraging historical content with new
technology that helps improve data quality, identify relationships between
data on disparate systems, and combine existing resources for enhanced analysis
and decision support capability. We focus on ways to automate processes and
enhance communication interoperability between systems and users across an
organization.
Health systems can realize significant benefits from systems integration
services. For example, health records on legacy systems may contain Personally
Identifiable Information (PII) that is unnecessarily accessible to users.
Medical databases may be separate from patient dosage information. Financial
systems may require personnel to view medical records to obtain accurate
data. ICF designs and implements systems that integrate with these resources
directly, providing cross-checks to improve data integrity, privacy and security
between systems and users, data exchange across different system architectures,
and data mining capabilities that can compare treatment information with
statistics on similar patients, latest published research resources, and
historical results.
Selected Projects in Health Systems Integration
and Interoperability
eRA Systems Engineering Support Services
National Institutes of Health, Office of Extramural
Research
ICF provides extensive health informatics support services including systems engineering and software development to the electronic Research Administration (eRA) program through multiple contracts to help the National Institutes of Health (NIH) achieve its vision for the paperless transfer of extramural research grant application and administrative data. Comprising 30 integrated systems that support more than 200,000 users, eRA is NIH’s infrastructure for conducting interactive electronic transactions for the receipt, review, monitoring, and administration of NIH grant awards to biomedical and behavioral investigators worldwide.
ICF integrated Personally Identifiable Information (PII) security into
exiting eRA systems in accordance with National Institute of Standards and
Technology guidelines. This included an exhaustive analysis of existing systems
that displayed PII data and the implementation of security layers to ensure
that only authorized individuals with a valid business need could access
records when necessary.
Budget Execution and Formulation Support Systems
National Cancer Institute
ICF provides health informatics expertise and analysis
to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Office of Budget and Finance, specifically
with systems integration/interoperability support to maintain, enhance, apply,
and document the Budget Execution and Formulation Support System (BEFSS).
NCI uses the BEFSS extensively in budget execution, formulation, and presentation
and development of projections for inclusion in NCI planning documents. Our
team designed and developed the BEFSS with two components: the Budget Formulation
and Presentation Support System (BFPSS) and the Budget Execution Support
System (BESS).
The BFPSS facilitates rapid development and analysis of fiscal profile
data, including extensive report formatting software and algorithms for allocating
administrative support dollars and positions across the programmatic categories
used in NCI's budgets. ICF also developed additional tools for entering and
debugging budget inputs. For the BESS, we developed three subsystems to assist
NCI with preparing and distributing current fiscal year operating budget/notification-of-allowances
information, accessing NIH-maintained accounting data for monthly budget
reports, and allowing budget analysts to enter monthly estimates of expenditures
for the remainder of the fiscal year.
