The White House on Aug. 3 unveiled new telehealth features for veterans, including a smartphone application that veterans can use to make doctor’s appointments. The telehealth effort will offer services to help veterans seeking care whether they are at home or overseas.
Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin announced that his agency plans to move its medical records to the same electronic system currently used by the Department of Defense.
John Short, the program executive for the VistA Evolution program at the Department of Veterans Affairs, has been tapped to take over as the acting deputy director of the DOD/VA Interagency Program Office responsible for ensuring electronic health record sharing between the VA and the Pentagon.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has issued a FedRAMP authority to operate for Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, which covers VA’s most sensitive data, Microsoft announced.
The website VA Review allows veterans and their families to post honest reviews of medical care and make more informed health care choices. After being active for only six months, VA Review has already amassed more than 1,000 users.
The Department of Veterans Affairs plans to move forward with a nationwide rollout and test of homegrown improvements to the scheduling component of its electronic health record.
The on-again, off-again story of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ $642 million commercial scheduling system is not only back on track, but is likely part of a larger movement by the department to finally adopt a commercial electronic health record system.
Less than six months into her tenure as the Department of Veterans Affairs’ chief information security officer, Roopangi Kadakia has been tasked to lead the agency’s cloud efforts. Dominic Cussatt will take over as acting CISO, according to an internal agency memo obtained by MeriTalk.
The Department of Veterans Affairs this week launched a new website to raise awareness of the agency’s Digital Health Platform–a cloud-based approach to integrating veterans health data to produce what the agency calls real-time, analytics-driven, personalized care.
The Veterans Health Administration has for the first time acknowledged publicly that software problems with its Online Health Care Application on Vets.gov caused tens of thousands of veteran applications to be locked or lost in the process, forcing the agency to disable the app and pay employees overtime to manually work through the applications.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) update on the “MyVA” transformation shows progress in serving veterans. This is the third update of the semi-annual report on the effort to make VA the No. 1 customer-service agency in the Federal government.
Just weeks before senior officials at the Veterans Health Administration ordered the launch of a new Online Health Care Application through Vets.gov, a senior policy adviser at the White House warned VHA officials that the new app had not been cleared by agency lawyers because of legal and technical issues that, ultimately, affected veteran enrollment across the nation.
Federal agencies have increased the amount of money they spend on outdated IT systems, according to a study from the International Data Corporation.
In his Monday report on the status of the White House Cancer Moonshot, Vice President Joe Biden listed big data and data sharing as key components in today’s fight against cancer.
The White House announced the creation of 29 tools Thursday that use Federal and local data to address problems identified by Federal agencies as part of the Opportunity Project, an open data effort to improve economic mobility for all Americans.
In August, as President Barack Obama stood in front of the Disabled American Veterans Convention and publicly hailed the success of a new health care enrollment app on Vets.gov, the system had actually been spinning out of control for months, losing thousands of applications, locking records, and allowing officials to mark veterans ineligible for benefits without legal justification, according to hundreds of pages of internal documents obtained by MeriTalk.
The Department of Veterans Affairs announced that the Department of Homeland Security and Hiring our Heroes have teamed up to offer free online, on-demand cybersecurity training to government employees and veterans via DHS’ Federal Virtual Training Environment.
Federal agencies are putting increasing amounts of time and resources into providing telemedicine for American veterans.
A software upgrade gone wrong caused widespread system outages across the Veterans Affairs Department, officials confirmed Tuesday. The agency’s main website, VA.gov, as well as Vets.gov, associated websites, and apps were temporarily affected, a VA spokesperson told MeriTalk.
The Obama administration this month announced a series of new investments, partnerships, and policies to further the Precision Medicine Initiative, including $55 million in awards from the National Institutes of Health.
The Department of Veterans Affairs this week appointed two veteran government IT leaders to key agency posts responsible for data sharing with the Defense Department and cybersecurity.
It’s one of the centerpieces of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ transformation effort. But the so-called strategic sourcing initiative has some front-line IT employees worried that it’s really just a code word for outsourcing their jobs to the private sector. Strategic sourcing is at the heart of VA’s new IT enterprise strategy, and leverages the […]
The White House announced that it’s launching the Data Driven Justice initiative, which intends to use data to decrease prison recidivism and improve response and care for at-risk and mentally ill citizens.
The Department of Veterans Affairs misused $51.9 million in medical appropriations to fund development of mobile health applications and an enhancement to the Veteran Information Systems and Technology Architecture, violating Federal appropriations law, according to a preliminary inspector general report obtained by MeriTalk. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs has been consumed with transformation for the past 21 months, attempting to change from what Secretary Robert McDonald has privately described as a “Kremlinesque” culture to a high performing organization that puts veterans in control of their healthcare. That transformation effort, known as MyVA, is McDonald’s direct response to the […]
Brian Burns, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ chief information security officer, has resigned, according to an internal agency memo obtained by MeriTalk.
Congress has passed an appropriations bill to fund increased medical care for military veterans–particularly women–a burgeoning contingent of the vet population. The bill contains language that presses the VA to improve health care for female veterans by considering the launch of a mobile health care pilot program.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has contracted software company Ad Hoc to provide support for its Vets.gov site, which is designed to consolidate all of VA’s services in one area.
Department of Veterans Affairs Chief Information Officer LaVerne Council announced that Susan McHugh-Polley, the official who led the development of the VA’s enterprise cybersecurity strategy, is now the permanent deputy assistant secretary for Service, Delivery, and Engineering.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is on what appears to be an irreversible losing streak when it comes to its annual cybersecurity audit. Last week, VA’s Office of the Inspector General slapped the agency with a “material weakness” designation for its information security efforts—the 16th year in a row that VA has failed the annual […]