Minimum Essential Characteristics Table.pdf

Minimum Essential Characteristics | Technical Spec

Minimum Essential Characteristics

A framework for assessing system capabilities, compliance baselines, and remediation strategies.

Prepared By: Warfighter Readiness, Performance, and Brain Health (WRPBH) Project Management Office (PMO)

Date of Issue: September 10, 2026

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Overview

2. Technical & Operational Characteristics Matrix

3. Instructions for Completion

1. Overview This document provides the structured evaluation matrix for essential system and technical characteristics, outlining minimum requirements, desired capabilities, compliance status, and remediation plans where applicable. It serves as a baseline for technical alignment, ensuring all architectural and operational standards are met or systematically planned for integration.

2. Technical & Operational Characteristics Matrix

No. Essential Characteristic

Minimum Characteristic Required Desired Characteristics Meets MINIMUM or DESIRED?

Discuss Plan to Meet Minimum

1 User Population Describe supported user types, role-based access, and scalable user capacity.

Supports scalable user growth, granular role-based access, delegated administration, and separation of user populations or organizations as needed.

☐ Minimum ☐ Desired

2 Data Sources Describe support for vendor applications, VA-connected/VA-originating applications, DHA systems, and future sources.

Supports onboarding of new data sources through documented, repeatable integration patterns with minimal custom development.

3 Data Types Describe support for clinical, administrative, operational, financial, scheduling, encounter, assessment, document, and analytics data, as applicable.

Supports structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, with configurable schemas and metadata management.

4 Data Volume Provide current and projected storage volumes, ingestion assumptions, and growth assumptions.

Scales storage and processing capacity without material service interruption and provides transparent capacity-monitoring and forecasting capabilities.

No. Essential Characteristic

Minimum Characteristic Required Desired Characteristics Meets MINIMUM or DESIRED?

Discuss Plan to Meet Minimum

5 Data Refresh Describe available near-real-time, daily, weekly, and on-demand data-refresh options.

Supports near-real-time data exchange where operationally appropriate, with configurable refresh schedules, error handling, and reconciliation reporting.

6 Availability Provide proposed uptime/service-level options and maintenance assumptions.

Provides high availability, planned-maintenance notification, service-level reporting, and an architecture designed to reduce single points of failure.

7 Recovery Provide proposed recovery-time and recovery-point objectives.

Provides documented, regularly tested recovery procedures and recovery objectives appropriate to the criticality of the hosted data and services.

8 Data Retention Describe configurable retention, archival, export, and disposition capabilities.

Provides policy-based retention, legal-hold support when applicable, automated archival and disposition workflows, and verifiable deletion or disposal reporting.

9 Integration Describe supported integration patterns, including APIs, FHIR, HL7, batch, secure file transfer, event streaming, and other supported patterns.

Supports standards-based, secure interoperability and reusable interfaces, including APIs and healthcare-data exchange standards where applicable.

10 Security Describe authentication, authorization, encryption, audit logging, monitoring, and incident-response capabilities.

Provides centralized security monitoring, configurable alerts, encryption in transit and at rest, strong identity and access controls, and support for continuous monitoring.

No. Essential Characteristic

Minimum Characteristic Required Desired Characteristics Meets MINIMUM or DESIRED?

Discuss Plan to Meet Minimum

11 Portability Describe the ability to export complete data sets, metadata, documentation, and audit records in nonproprietary or widely usable formats.

Enables complete, timely, and usable export of data, metadata, audit records, interface documentation, and configuration information without undue proprietary dependency.

12 Analytics Describe reporting, dashboards, data-science enablement, and controlled data-sharing capabilities.

Supports self-service reporting, configurable dashboards, governed data sharing, data-quality monitoring, and controlled analytics or data-science workflows.

13 Sustainment Describe staffing, support hours, ticket response, patching, upgrades, and knowledge transfer.

Provides scalable operational support, documented service-management processes, routine patching and upgrades, training, and knowledge transfer to Government personnel or a successor provider.

14 Transition Describe implementation timeline ranges, migration methodology, validation, and rollback options.

Provides a phased transition approach with data-validation procedures, rollback contingencies, documented exit support, and minimal disruption to users and mission operations.

3. Instructions for Completion Please adhere to the following guidelines when completing the evaluation matrix:

1. Compliance Level: Indicate whether the proposed solution meets the Minimum baseline or fulfills the Desired advanced capability by checking the corresponding box in column 5.

2. Action Plan / Remediation: If the baseline minimum characteristic is not currently met, provide a detailed description of the development, integration, or configuration plan required to achieve compliance in column 6. Ensure you include expected timeframes and resource dependencies.