Data provides parents, educators, and policymakers with the information they need to personalize and support student learning.
“It’s incredibly important that the individual classroom teacher… [is] able to use data and access data to drive learning in their class,” said Chip Slaven, the counsel to the president and senior advocacy adviser for the Alliance for Excellent Education. “So they know they have a better understanding of what each individual student’s needs are.” […]

An e-book published to coincide with World Oceans Day hopes to bring together researchers, government agencies, students, and technology to better the understanding of the world’s oceans. “If the oceans need help, then the entire planet needs help,” said Dawn J. Wright, chief scientist at Esri and editor of the second edition of Ocean Solutions, Earth Solutions. […]

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights released an infographic, “Your Health Information, Your Rights,” to provide health consumers with facts on an individual’s right to access their medical records, examples of how to obtain medical records, and tips for protecting health information. […]

Doctors and researchers believe they can understand and eventually cure cancer through data sets, with the launch of the Genomic Data Commons, a system that promotes sharing of genomic and clinical data among researchers. […]

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) have been working together to try to remove barriers to health data exchange. […]

Nearly all reported non-Federal, acute care hospitals–96 percent–possessed a certified electronic health record technology in 2015, according to data released from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. […]

Consumer expectations and needs demand that health data be shared and made easily accessible, according to Karen DeSalvo, the national coordinator for Health IT at HHS. Consumers are expecting that we share their data and HIPAA allows it,” DeSalvo said. […]

The winner of the Smart City Challenge will be announced this month. The seven finalists selected in April from a pool of 78 applicants received a $100,000 grant to further build their final proposals. The finalists are Pittsburgh; Columbus, Ohio; Austin; Denver; San Francisco; Portland, Ore., and Kansas City, Mo. […]

Proponents of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA) worry that a change in presidential administration could derail the progress made to release Federal financial data to the public. […]

Students are directed to go online for schoolwork, and corporations are reaping the benefits by subjecting these students to targeted marketing. The National Education Policy Center’s 18th Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends examines how “the policies that enable and encourage these practices connect today’s children and adolescents to monitoring and to marketers.” […]

For the first time, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released the Medicare standardized payment amount, which makes Medicare payments across all geographic areas comparable.
The information was part of the third annual release of the Physician and Other Supplier Utilization and Payment public use data. […]

Big data has the potential to both increase and decrease discrimination based on the ethics of its use, according to speakers at the Ford Foundation Fairness by Design event. […]

Many Americans’ electronically stored medical data is likely unsecured and inaccurate, according to panelists at the Health Datapalooza. “There are real-world consequences to medical data sharing,” said privacy and medical attorney Neal Eggeson. […]

Vice President Joe Biden implored attendees of the Health Datapalooza to join in his effort to make cancer data more accessible and usable. “We really need you,” Biden said. […]

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology will be offering two awards with a total of $1.5 million in funding opportunities for projects that advance common standards designed to improve health information for both consumers and providers. […]

The MetroLab Network has grown to 35 city/county-university partnerships working together to research, develop, and deploy technologies and policy approaches in order to address urban areas’ challenges. MetroLab Network was launched in September 2015 by 21 city/county-university pairings, as part of President Obama’s Smart Cities Initiative. […]

The size of the digital universe will grow to 176 zettabytes by 2025 – leading to a future of machine learning. James Harris, CTO, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Jason Matheny, Director, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, joined Defense One on a live webcast on how the future of digital information will intersect with the future of intelligence collection and analysis. […]

Six states–Arizona, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia–are participating in a learning lab on improving the use of data to drive efficient decision-making in policymaking, the National Governors Association announced. […]

Haley Van Dyck, the co-founder of the U.S. Digital Service, brought the U.S. government’s unique brand of startup to a new TED Talk. Filmed in February in Vancouver, British Columbia, and released this week, Van Dyck’s talk urged technology entrepreneurs to disrupt their government by introducing technologies most of us take for granted. […]

Government officials and industry leaders will try to get to the bottom of why interoperability has been so difficult to achieve, they said at the second meeting of the Joint Health IT Policy and Standards Committee Meeting Interoperability Experience Task Force. […]

Despite information security progress, the IRS still has deficiencies in controls over taxpayer data, according to a GAO study that found insufficient controls in identity authentication, server access, encryption of authentication data, auditing systems to ensure compliance with agency policies, and access to restricted areas. […]

Creepy Data It’s no secret that my D.C. network of informants are concerned about the future of the Internet of Things and the potential for major tears in the social fabric if policy does not keep pace with technological development. But some members of the D.C. network have started sounding the alarm over China’s use […]

The Federal government is looking for ways to put the hammer down on health care data blockers and data hackers. As voluntary compliance isn’t working, Karen DeSalvo, National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, told a congressional hearing that she has called for funding to “put some teeth around” going after data blockers. […]

MeriTalk’s feature, a Q&A with prominent IT leaders, focuses this time on G. Nagesh Rao, the Chief Technologist with the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Investment and Innovation for the Small Business Technology Transfers (STTR)/ Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs. […]

The government wants to be better, and technology is the way to get there, President Obama told a crowd at the South by Southwest festival in Austin. The president emphasized the need for the government to advance in its use of technology in order to better serve its people. […]

The White House is encouraging Federal software collaboration and improvement with the software draft policy it released on Thursday. The policy would require software developed by or for the Federal government to be made available for sharing and improvement across Federal agencies. […]

Verizon Wireless and the FCC agreed on a settlement on the company’s use of “supercookies” in customers’ mobile Internet use. The supercookies, also known as Unique Identifier Headers, enable Verizon to identify customers and deliver targeted advertising programs to them. […]

The White House launched its “Opportunity Project,” an open-data program that partners with public and private organizations and provides information about access to opportunity in cities across America. The aim: to provide all Americans with access to as many opportunities as possible, regardless of social or financial status. […]

Big Data Innovation – Driving Better Decisions?: July 12, 2016 The White House, with input from 15 Federal agencies, has expanded plans to maximize the potential of big data with the launch of The Federal Big Data Research and Development Strategic Plan.  Agencies agree that big data can lead to further innovation and better decision-making […]

MeriTalk’s regular new feature, a Q&A with prominent IT leaders, focuses this time on Dr. Michael Valivullah, CTO of the National Agricultural Statistics Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. […]