Health Ready Components are essential to unlocking the potential of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) as it relates to real-time diagnosis and prognosis in order to achieve lower maintenance costs, greater asset availability, reliability and safety. IVHM results in reduced maintenance costs by providing more accurate fault isolation and repair guidance. IVHM results in greater asset availability, reliability and safety by recommending preventative maintenance and by identifying anomalous behavior indicative of degraded functionality prior to detection of the fault by other detection mechanisms. The cost, complexity and effectiveness of the IVHM system design, deployment and support depend, to a great extent, on the degree to which components and subsystems provide the run-time data needed by IVHM and the design time semantic data to allow IVHM to interpret those messages.A great benefit can be achieved if a common approach is developed to assist suppliers in the development of “health-ready” components and systems and to simplify the process by which integrators use these capabilities to deploy IVHM applications. In this context, the term “health ready” refers to a component or system that implements the required set of IVHM run-time interfaces and provides the associated semantic data in an appropriate format. The SAE Aerospace Recommended Practice ARP6268 document is being developed to achieve this objective. The ARP is being developed within the framework of the SAE HM-1 committee by a team with both aerospace and automotive engineering backgrounds.The intent of the ARP is to provide practitioners with a structured methodology for specifying, characterizing and exposing the inherent component or subsystem IVHM functions by using a common functional reference model, through the exchange of design-time data and the application of standard vehicle data communications interfaces.This paper provides an overview of the motivation and rationale behind the ARP and a summary of the ARP methodology describing how it would be applied by integrators and suppliers of components and subsystems in the aerospace and automotive sectors.