DHA’s Data Strategy and Signals for Industry Solutions

On a typical day in 2024, the Defense Health Agency (DHA) reported the military health system (MHS) encountered 164,000 patients and 205,000 procedures across military hospitals and medical clinics globally. Assuming this pace continues throughout the fiscal year, MHS is estimated to have managed 60 million occurrences in FY25. The sheer volume of data generated across the MHS is immense. Optimizing this data is critical for clinicians and healthcare providers to support the health and readiness of service members. To improve the effective use of military health data, DHA has recently updated its data strategy through 2030 to provide a roadmap for its data-centric organization, offering opportunities for IT vendors and partners.

Guiding Principles

DHA’s data strategy primarily seeks to improve how data is governed and securely shared to help military leaders, planners and medical personnel make faster, smarter decisions. It is guided by seven principles to ensure that data will be a valuable and trusted asset throughout the defense agency:

1. Mission Readiness First: Data is treated as a mission-enabling strategic asset that supports and strengthens combat readiness, healthcare and measurable outcomes for warfighters and families.
2. Federated Governance: Establishes enterprise-wide standards for data governance while enabling domain teams to manage their own data sets.
3. Collective Data Stewardship: Accountability of data protection, quality and ethical use in every team member when working with enterprise data.
4. Data as a product (DaaP): Data is managed like a product, requiring proper governance, updates and performance monitoring.
5. Authoritative Data Sources (ADS): Ensures that users recognize which data is official and reliable. Data should exhibit trustworthiness with verifiable sources, transparency and accountability.
6. Foundation of Data: Active documentation and validation are required to inform users about data specificity and facilitate ease of discovery.
7. Security and Privacy: Security protocols like access control, data labeling and classification assignment are integrated from the initial creation phase to ensure compliance and protect sensitive health and personal information.

Line of Efforts

The Strategy is further built around five lines of effort (LOE) that operationalize its vision of data as a mission asset, offering opportunities for industry collaboration.

• LOE1: Strengthen Data Roles and Responsibilities — Everyone is explicitly accountable for how data is managed, protected and used. This includes operationalizing a Federated Governance Model, defining and assigning clear roles, operational procedures and responsibilities (such as data owners and stewards) to ensure governance consistency across critical data domains and training the workforce on ethics, quality standards and data security to prepare them for effective use of the military health system (MHS). This objective signals requirements for industry tools that fit a Federated Governance Model with clear roles and accountability and provide tailored training to the DHA workforce in their assigned roles.
• LOE2: Maximizes Use of Authoritative Data Sources (ADS) — DHA data products are created from a designated “single source of truth”. DHA will vet and register these authoritative data sources; prioritize how well they support its healthcare and combat-readiness missions. The plan includes creating a repeatable data consolidation process to reduce fragmentation and facilitate future consolidation efforts. IT solutions will need to be integrated with DHA-designated ADS, avoiding new, competing data silos. Expertise in data systems consolidation and redundancy reduction aligns well with the DHA’s data consolidation strategy.
• LOE3: Operationalize Data as a Product (DaaP) — Transitioning the DHA away from project-based data delivery toward reusable data products tailored to mission outcomes. DHA will define a full product lifecycle, standard specifications (lineage, security, metadata, quality and interoperability), and Service Level Agreements; then prioritize the first group of high mission-value products, measure their adoption and value. The agency will streamline the data request process, applying data rules to deliver the most relevant data to the users quickly. IT companies should frame data solutions around reusable, governed data products with clear standard specifications. Tools that help request, manage and improve these products over time will resonate strongly with the DHA.
• LOE4: Build Trust through Data Quality and Transparency — Data quality is made measurable and visible so users can assess reliability. DHA will publish an enterprise data scorecard and its DHA Enterprise Data Catalog (EDC) lineage, so consumers know data origins. A remediation process will address critical data quality concerns. Solutions providing automated data quality scoring, tracking and error remediation, as well as displaying those scores and their data origin, will align strongly with this objective. This helps build confidence in the data and improve critical decision-making.
• LOE5: Maintain the DHA Enterprise Data Catalog (EDC) — The EDC serves as the single library for stakeholders to explore and retrieve enterprise datasets. DHA will keep the EDC updated and apply metadata protocols (use of data dictionaries, business rules, and usage guidance) and expose metadata quality indicators and contexts to let users know the reliability of the datasets. EDC also serves as a learning tool to build staff knowledge and use enterprise data effectively. IT solutions embedding catalog context directly into the enterprise data catalog to facilitate clinical and analytic workflows will be of strong interest to the DHA, especially those that can use EDC and tools to enhance workforce learning and data use.

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About the Author:
Toan Le is a Senior Market Insights Analyst on the DLT Market Insights team covering DOD and IC domain-centric trends across the Public Sector.