Senior Health Informatics Standards and Interoperability Consultant

Job Summary Senior Health Informatics Standards and Interoperability Consultant Aptive is seeking a Senior Health Informatics Standards and Interoperability Consultant to support the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Office of Health Informatics (OHI), Clinical Informatics and Data Management Office (OCI), in advancing the enterprise standard of care through standardized, semantically consistent, and reliably exchanged health data across 170+ VA Medical Centers. This role spans both the meaning of clinical data and the movement of it. You will develop the semantic infrastructure (metadata, ontology standards, terminology tooling, and knowledge management resources) that governs how clinical concepts are represented, and you will provide expert oversight across healthcare integration standards, standards implementation, data integration, systems integration, data modeling, and data warehousing. You will serve as the formal liaison and advisor between VHA architecture and analysis teams and standards bodies such as HL7, and provide expert guidance on scientific and medical informatics domains. Work on this program is organized under the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Semantic models, integration designs, data models, and analytical products are delivered as Features within quarterly Planning Intervals, demonstrated to the government on a two-week cadence, and tracked in Jira and Jira Align. The ideal candidate brings a decade of analysis and management experience in the health sciences, deep ontology and interoperability expertise, and the judgment to set technical direction that others will build against. Primary Responsibilities • Semantic Infrastructure Development. Develop and maintain the semantic infrastructure supporting enterprise clinical data, including metadata, ontology standards, information models, reference data, and value sets used in the classification and standardization of clinical and medical data. • Ontology Design and Governance. Design, extend, and govern ontologies and controlled vocabularies; establish modeling conventions, hierarchies, and post-coordination rules; and evaluate ontology quality, internal consistency, and fitness for intended use. • Semantic Interoperability. Apply semantic interoperability concepts so clinical data can be exchanged and reused across systems without loss of meaning; develop, test, and validate mappings and crosswalks between local, national, and international code systems. • Knowledge Management. Build and maintain knowledge management resources such as wikis, knowledge bases, data dictionaries, modeling guides, and decision repositories so that semantic and architectural decisions remain discoverable, auditable, and reusable. • Healthcare Integration Standards Oversight. Provide expert oversight of healthcare integration standards across the program; establish which standards apply to which exchange scenarios, resolve conflicting interpretations, and set the technical direction that engineering and analysis teams build against. • Standards Implementation. Guide implementation of HL7 v2, C-CDA, FHIR, SNOMED CT, LOINC, RxNorm, and CDISC; review interface specifications, conformance profiles, and implementation guides; and validate that delivered work conforms to both the standard and VHA requirements. • Data Integration. Direct the design and oversight of data integration across clinical, administrative, and ancillary source systems; define transformation, reconciliation, and error-handling approaches; and assess integration quality, completeness, and semantic fidelity end to end. • Systems Integration. Oversee integration between enterprise health systems and downstream consumers; evaluate interface engines, messaging patterns, and API strategies; and identify dependencies, failure modes, and performance constraints before they reach production. • Data Modeling. Lead logical and physical data modeling for health information assets; govern model conventions, keys, and lineage; and ensure models support both operational exchange and downstream analytic use without rework. • Data Warehousing. Provide oversight of health data warehouse design and evolution, including source-to-target mapping, dimensional and normalized modeling approaches, historization, and the controls needed to keep warehoused data trustworthy for reporting and decision support. • High-Level Analysis. Perform high-level analytical duties on complex informatics, integration, and information management problems; evaluate options against cost, risk, and mission impact; and produce defensible recommendations for government decision-makers. • Standards Body Liaison. Serve as liaison and advisor between the architecture and analysis team and standards bodies such as HL7, SNOMED International, and CDISC; track ballots, releases, and emerging specifications; represent VHA technical interests; and translate standards activity into concrete program guidance. • Expert Domain G...