Glossary

Software that listens during a clinical encounter and creates a draft note for clinician review and signature.

A maintained internal record of every algorithmic or AI-based tool in use at an organization, including what each does, where it is deployed, who owns it, and how it is monitored.

The ongoing surveillance of deployed clinical algorithms for performance drift, unintended effects, and harm, modeled on the pharmacovigilance practice used for medicines.

A contract required under HIPAA between a covered healthcare organization and a vendor that will create, receive, maintain, or transmit protected health information on its behalf.

Knowledge, alerts, rules, or predictions delivered to clinicians to support a healthcare decision or workflow.

Spending on an asset the organization will own and depreciate over years, which in a hospital is approved on an annual capital cycle rather than whenever the need appears.

A practicing or formerly practicing physician who leads clinical informatics, translating between clinical needs and information technology decisions.

A nurse executive who leads nursing informatics, owning how clinical systems affect nursing workflow, documentation, and staffing.

The clinician inside the organization who advocates for a purchase, assembles the internal case for it, and carries it through committee review.

The work of connecting a third-party product to an electronic health record so data flows between them and clinicians can use it without leaving their existing workflow.

An organization that negotiates supply and equipment contracts on behalf of many hospitals at once, so its members buy on pre-negotiated terms instead of negotiating individually.

A certifiable security and privacy framework widely used in United States healthcare to demonstrate a vendor’s control environment to its customers.

A healthcare data exchange standard from HL7 that defines discrete clinical data resources and a web API for accessing them.

A network of hospitals, clinics, physician groups, and sometimes insurance operations under shared ownership, which buys and standardizes as one organization rather than site by site.

Recurring spending consumed within the budget year, including subscriptions, services, supplies, and staffing, owned by the department whose budget it hits.

A content and delivery system used by healthcare organizations to provide approved health information before, during, or after care.

The decision point at which a limited trial deployment either becomes a funded organization-wide implementation or is discontinued.

Structured, continuing measurement of how a deployed clinical tool actually performs in the organization using it, as distinct from how it performed during evaluation.

A regulatory mechanism through which a manufacturer of a regulated software product describes, in advance, the modifications it intends to make and how it will validate them.

Individually identifiable health information held or transmitted by a covered entity or its business associate, regulated in the United States under HIPAA.

Software that analyzes medical images or supports imaging workflow through triage, detection, measurement, reporting, or related functions.

A preliminary, non-binding solicitation used to survey what a market offers before the organization commits to specifying requirements or buying anything.

A formal, structured solicitation in which a healthcare organization states requirements and invites vendors to respond on identical terms so responses can be scored comparably.

A specification that lets a third-party application launch inside an electronic health record with authorization and clinical context already established.

An audit report on a service provider’s controls over security and, optionally, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.

Software intended to be used for a medical purpose that performs that purpose without being part of a hardware medical device.

A written internal argument that only one supplier can meet a requirement, used to buy without running a competitive process.

The deliberate reduction of the number of different products used for the same purpose across an organization, in order to lower cost and complexity.

The security, privacy, and resilience review a healthcare organization performs on a vendor before allowing it access to systems or data.

The full multi-year cost of a purchase including implementation, integration, interfaces, training, support, internal staffing, and eventual replacement, not just the license or purchase price.

The standing committee inside a hospital or health system that reviews a proposed purchase for clinical benefit, cost, and fit before it can move to contracting.