Intelligent Healthcare has a very real potential to influence Healthcare policy in the United States. How this influence takes shape remains to be seen, but what is clear is that the greater the level of success of IH, the more likely it will become tied to other policy initiatives, such as Healthcare Research & Quality reporting (conducted by AHRQ). It is pragmatic to begin planning for those outcomes in advance so that mitigations for the issues that are likely to occur can be addressed early on. An important part of the Federated Lifecycle Management or governance aspects of Intelligent Healthcare addresses policy development, management and reconciliation with engineering realities. This also provides the foundation for compliance assessment or certification guidelines, techniques or tools.

Policy can and should become more closely aligned to Healthcare initiative requirements, eventually this might become an interactive process across the Healthcare IT community, going far beyond endorsement or assessment of standards and protocols. This may expand to include endorsement of best practices, performance expectations and design conventions. The figure below illustrates the interconnected nature of policy and the need to keep it aligned to stakeholder communities. One of the true advantages of Intelligent Healthcare is its ability to link policy and program lifecycle management (both for development of Healthcare IT capabilities as well as for support of the actual provision of Healthcare services).