Our 4th Solution focus area for the Intelligent Healthcare Practice is Lifecycle Management.

The nature of this solution is unique in that the technical and program management elements of the approach are in fact combined in many respects. This is especially apparent with the Federated Lifecycle Management Phase. This phase might be described as the creation of a ‘virtual program management’ support organization that aids multiple projects within the same initiative set. The intent is not to recreate all elements of a Program Management Office (PMO) which may be needed, but rather to focus on a smaller subset of capabilities that can be applied to many projects that currently don’t have PMO-like support. Federated Lifecycle Management is the third phase of the project, however it would begin shortly after the project initiated as it is the primary objective of the entire project.   

Federation in this context has several connotations:

• A realization that no direct reporting chain between the support providers and the project entities may exist.
• A realization that similar and dissimilar projects can support unified strategies, policies or objectives of larger thematic initiatives.
• A realization that the data sets involved in any particular project which seem specialized are in fact potentially part of a larger converged Healthcare data set.
• A realization that application logic or processes which are specialized within a specific capability domain can and should later be orchestrated with other services. Also, that not all interoperability research projects are limited to data but many are instead geared towards exposing both service capabilities and data together.
• A realization that policy, programs and projects are dynamic.

In order to exercise Governance, either in a traditional or Federated manner, we must first begin with a metrics baseline. The metrics baseline allows us to provide a way to assess projects or help them assess themselves. Our Intelligent Healthcare solution will track the following metrics as part of its Federated Lifecycle Management approach:

• Portfolio Health
• Program Health
• Project Health
• Policy Compliance
• Risk Mitigation
• Patient Outcome Performance
• Systems Performance
• Interoperability Maturity
• Commercial Exploitation Factor
• Innovation Level
• ROI Factor