CHTP key terms

A time-phased plan showing which technologies an organization will adopt, replace, or retire over the next several years, tied to business goals and budget cycles.

The condition in which technology investments and priorities directly support the organization's clinical, operational, and financial goals, so that technology work is justified by the value it delivers.

A structured description of an organization's business processes, applications, data, and infrastructure, used to plan how these layers fit together and where standardization or replacement is needed.

A decision document that states a proposed change, the problem it solves, expected costs and benefits, alternatives considered, and risks, so leaders can approve, defer, or reject the investment.

The set of decision rights, policies, and forums that determine who approves technology spending, sets standards, and monitors performance, linking technology decisions to organizational accountability.

A cross-functional group of senior leaders that reviews project status, resolves escalated issues, approves scope and funding changes, and keeps initiatives aligned with organizational priorities.

The deliberate process of identifying people affected by a technology change, communicating with them, and involving them so that adoption barriers surface early and support is built.

A structured approach to helping staff move from current workflows to new ones through communication, training, sponsorship, and reinforcement, addressing the human side rather than the technical side of change.

A set of practices for delivering and supporting technology services, covering incident, problem, change, and request handling so that services are reliable, documented, and measured against agreed targets.

A repository that records each configuration item, such as servers, devices, and applications, and the relationships among them, supporting impact analysis, incident diagnosis, and accurate change planning.

A design approach that keeps a system running through component failures by adding redundancy, automatic failover, and monitoring, typically targeting agreed uptime levels rather than absolute prevention of outages.

Plans and infrastructure for restoring systems and data after a major disruption, defined by recovery time objective (how long an outage may last) and recovery point objective (how much data loss is tolerable).

The division of responsibility between provider and customer across infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service, determining who manages hardware, operating systems, applications, and data.

A data protection practice of keeping three copies of data on two different media types with one copy off-site, so that corruption, ransomware, or site loss does not destroy the only copy.

The assignment of accountability, policy, and standards for data quality, definitions, access, and use, so that staff across departments treat data as a managed organizational asset rather than a local byproduct.

A system that assigns and maintains a single identifier for each patient across multiple applications, helping to link records from different sources and reduce duplicate or fragmented charts.

Policy and practice covering how data is created, stored, used, shared, archived, and destroyed, including retention schedules that satisfy legal requirements while limiting unnecessary storage and exposure.

Measurable characteristics such as accuracy, completeness, timeliness, consistency, and uniqueness, used to assess whether data is fit for clinical, operational, and reporting purposes.

Individually identifiable health information created, received, or maintained by a covered entity or its business associate, protected by federal privacy and security rules regardless of the medium it is stored in.

A contract required before a covered entity shares protected health information with an outside vendor, obligating the vendor to safeguard the data and report breaches.

A documented process of identifying threats and vulnerabilities to health information systems, estimating likelihood and impact, and selecting safeguards, performed periodically and whenever the environment changes significantly.

An access model in which permissions are attached to job roles rather than to individuals, so users receive only the data and functions their duties require and access is easier to audit.

Dividing a network into separate zones with controlled traffic between them, so that a compromised device or user account cannot move freely to critical clinical or data systems.

Documented roles, steps, and communication paths for detecting, containing, eradicating, and recovering from a security incident, including when to notify leadership, regulators, and affected individuals.

A formal solicitation that describes requirements and evaluation criteria so multiple vendors can propose solutions in a comparable format, supporting fair competition and defensible selection decisions.

A contract term that defines the measurable level of service a vendor will provide, such as uptime, response time, and resolution time, along with reporting and remedies when targets are missed.

A hierarchical breakdown of project scope into progressively smaller deliverables and tasks, forming the basis for estimating effort, assigning responsibility, and tracking progress.

The longest sequence of dependent tasks in a project schedule; any delay on these tasks delays the whole project, so they receive the closest monitoring and the most contingency.

A recurring, scored evaluation of supplier performance against criteria such as service levels, quality, cost, support, and compliance, used in review meetings and renewal decisions.

A central team that sets project standards, provides templates and reporting, tracks the project portfolio, and coaches project managers so that initiatives are delivered consistently.

The full cost of owning a technology over its life, including acquisition, implementation, licensing, support, training, upgrades, downtime, and retirement, not just the initial purchase price.

A financial measure comparing net benefits to costs, usually expressed as a percentage, used to rank competing investments and to defend funding decisions to executives and finance staff.

The distinction between costs that are capitalized and depreciated over years, such as equipment and perpetual licenses, and costs charged to a period, such as subscriptions and hosting, which affects budgets and cloud decisions.

An accounting practice that bills technology costs back to the departments that consume them, based on usage or a formula, making demand and cost visible to business units.

The ability of different systems to exchange and meaningfully use data; HL7 FHIR is a modern, web-based standard for that exchange, using resources and APIs to represent clinical information.

Middleware that receives, transforms, and routes messages between systems in different formats, managing mappings, queues, and error handling so that point-to-point connections do not multiply.

A defined way for one software system to request data or actions from another, using documented endpoints, formats, and authentication, enabling integration without direct database access.

Networked medical devices and sensors that collect and transmit clinical data, introducing integration value along with risks from unpatched firmware, shared networks, and long equipment lifecycles.

Software that uses machine learning to support detection, prediction, or decision-making in care delivery, requiring validation, monitoring for performance drift, and human oversight before and after deployment.