CMS has conducted secure testing with the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory on different approaches and tools for a virtual data center environment.

“The idea with Oak Ridge was to get the folks who do Big Data with the National Weather Service and DOD to see if some of the work they did in those areas could be looked at in relation to the healthcare arena,” Trenkle said, such as faster and more efficient data management and a knowledge discovery infrastructure.

Now the agency will apply that approach to the agency’s business and operational environment at its main Baltimore data center.

A virtual data center will cut CMS’ footprint from 80 data centers down to six to eight data centers, Trenkle said. The agency recently awarded a contract to create a virtual data center environment that will enable more scalable, sustainable, integrated and consolidated uses of data.

CMS has started to establish the foundation for shared and enterprise services and will accelerate that in 2013 to be ready for the data management needs in 2014, including for health insurance exchanges and ACOs. CMS is focusing on shared services for:

• Identity management to conduct identity proofing and issue credentials, for when providers or other users connect with the agency’s 175 applications
• Enterprise portal, tied with identity management, to have a single face to the healthcare industry for services, such as registration and reporting
• Master data management to track payments and relationships across multiple payment programs
• Business rules engine that defines and applies policies and calculations to determine who gets what and how much under the various payment programs, such as for dual Medicare and Medicaid eligible and patient-centered medical homes.