“The Department of Veterans Affairs is focusing on human-centered design (HCD) as it improves interoperability across key programs, Paul Tibbits, the agency’s Office of Technical Integration Executive Director explained during and ACT-IAC event.”
“‘[With] human-centered design, journey mapping, value stream analysis [we] begin to better understand … ‘the why.’ Why do we want to do this stuff? With human-centered design, I think as a body of knowledge, brings to the table for us an institutionalized way to focus on real people who have real problems and use an approach … [called] empathetic observation to look at real people, to look at real problems,’ Tibbits said.”
“By putting HCD at the center of its interoperability efforts, VA will be better able to identify discontinuities in both services and systems. Then, the agency will bridge those gaps with technology solutions like APIs or interfaces. The “top-down” focus, as Tibbits described, will provide greater understanding of internal operations, as well as deliver more effective services to veterans.”
“’At the end of the day, we should wind up making the VA easier for the staff to operate, and we should make it easier for veterans to access the services of VA that they deserve,’ Tibbits said.”
“VA recently created an internal group, the VA Interoperability Leadership Team (VAIL), comprised of senior executive service-level members who pick use cases and apply a measurement framework. The framework has three primary components: business, data and technical assistance. Each of those components has subcomponents, and it takes a maturity index approach, where there’s a period A and period B measurement at two points in time…”
“One of VA’s key programs, Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM), is modernizing its infrastructure with a focus on interoperability to improve access to patient data. Although health records are now digital, Tibbits said the agency needs to develop a way to categorize and organize the records to make data discovery easier for the end user…” Read the full article here.
Source: Human-Centered Design’s Role in Data Interoperability – By Sarah Sybert, May 13, 2022. GovCIO.
