Accountable care organization—A recognized legal entity under state law, composed of a group of participants (providers of services and suppliers) that have established a mechanism for shared governance and work together to coordinate care for Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries.
applications architecture—Descriptive term encompassing the structure (e.g., logical organization), properties, and behavior (e.g., interactions) of the applications (e.g., functionality) needed to support a business process.
business ecosystem—The people, processes, services, and information required to operate and meet all business requirements of a specific business role that is independent of other business roles.
business glossary—A compendium of standard definitions, terminology, and representations regarding data to be shared across all the target business systems.
enterprise architecture—Descriptive term encompassing the structure, properties, and behavior of the components of an information system, including architectural layers such as process architecture, applications architecture, information architecture, and infrastructure architecture.
global business ecosystem—The union of all of the business ecosystems bearing on the business.
global information ecosystem—The union of all of the information ecosystems in the enterprise.
health information model—An authoritative set of policies and practices that define the health data objects within an enterprise that will be commonly used by business services; it determines a standard terminology regarding health data objects that is defined in the business glossary.
informatics—Used in the present report as a generic term to refer to both biomedical informatics (the core discipline) and health informatics (its application in clinical care and public health). The field deals with data, information, and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem solving, and decision making—motivated by efforts to improve human health.
information architecture—Descriptive term encompassing the structure, properties (e.g., formats), and behavior (e.g., flows) of the storage and management of information within a specific information system, with emphasis on information exchange among applications and processes.
information ecosystem—The information technology components and their interactions, automated and manual, required to build, develop, operate, and evolve one or perhaps multiple business functions; the term includes the people who design, build, maintain, and operate the systems.
information system families—Term used internally by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for groupings of information systems used to accomplish a specific business role; essentially synonymous with the present report’s use of “information ecosystem,” absent the focus on the humans who design, build, maintain, and operate the systems.
infrastructure architecture—Descriptive term encompassing the structure, properties, and behavior of the technology infrastructure (i.e., hardware and software) components of an information system; does not include information or applications in the information or applications architectures.
modernization, systems modernization—Refers to modest or evolutionary transitions of components and subcomponents of an information system.
process architecture—Descriptive term encompassing the structure, properties, and behavior of the processes in an information system.
software service—An abstraction that represents the execution of some set of actions as part of a process in an information ecosystem. Such services are implemented in modern enterprise architectures by means of remotely invoked procedures and service-level agreements with business units.
transformation, systems transformation—Refers to significant or revolutionary transitions of components and subcomponents of an information technology system.
