The future of healthcare technology for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) rests heavily in the cybersecurity of medical devices. […]

The House Appropriations Committee questioned today why the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is requesting $2.6 billion in funds for Fiscal Year 2021 for the VA’s Office of Electronic Health Records (EHR)— $1 billion more than the FY2020 request— when the EHR Modernization go-live date was delayed and wants better communication on information from the agency to avoid delays and cost more money. […]

The Government Accountability Office said in a new report that machine learning (ML) could help researchers save time and money in finding insights within biomedical or health-related data sets. […]

Health-focused government agencies are in a good position to lead implementation of Federal Data Strategy initiatives – such as improving data protection – because of their ongoing investments aimed at that goal, Federal CIO Suzette Kent said Jan. 15 at AFCEA Bethesda Health IT Summit. […]

The Department of Veterans Affairs has launched a new mobile application called VA Launchpad to save veterans and caregivers time online. […]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is seeking assistance to identify vendors that can provide simulations with virtually implanted generic medical devices using a whole-heart computational model. […]

Launched July 30, Data at the Point of Care is a new pilot program from the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the U.S. Digital Service that will assist healthcare providers in providing high quality care to Medicare beneficiaries by giving the providers easier access to a patient’s Medicare data for treatment. […]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing to create a pilot program within the Universal Service Fund (USF) that supports “connected care” for low-income Americans and veterans. […]

A principal author of Senate legislation that would pump $2.2 billion of Federal funding into development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies over the next five years said last week that investment would help a host of industry sectors including healthcare, energy, and agriculture. […]

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA), has awarded a $41.9 million contract for 49 Health Center Controlled Networks (HCCNs) to expand health information technology. […]

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) doesn’t have any current plans to utilize artificial intelligence in its operations, but mostly because it hasn’t yet found a practical use for the technology. […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) labeled health information technology (IT) as one of the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS’s) priority recommendation areas for this year. […]

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. […]

The Department of Health and Human Services announced that Vindell Washington will take over as head of HHS’s hub for all things health IT–the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC)–according to an internal memo issued by HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell. […]

Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell this week announced an anti-fraud task force led by the Justice and Health and Human Services Departments executed the largest takedown of health care fraud in U.S. history, charging 301 individuals in 36 Federal districts for health care schemes equaling $900 million. […]

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. […]

Data breaches are costing the health care industry an estimated $6.2 billion, with 89% of organizations represented in a new study by the Ponemon Institute having experienced a data breach in the past two years and 45% reporting more than five breaches in the same time period. […]

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. […]

HealthCare.gov had a rocky rollout, but future Federal tech projects could learn a lot from its trials and successes, according to Erin Bliss at the HHS Office of Inspector General. She testified in front of the Senate Finance Committee alongside Seto Bagdoyan, the director of forensic audits at GAO. […]

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) issued its latest version of a Health IT Strategic Plan last week, expanding it significantly over the plan released last year. This year’s plan, which covers goals to be accomplished between 2015 and 2020, is a result of ONC’s collaboration with 35 Federal partners, […]

State healthcare marketplaces, created under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), have made improvements over the past year, but problems still exist, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Healthcare.Gov, the Federal healthcare marketplace, has been plagued by problems since it went live in 2013, submitting the Federal government […]

Telehealth virtual consultations are expected to grow by more than 10 million over the next five years, according to research firm IHS, which projects these consultations to go from 16.6 million this year to 26.9 million by 2020. According to Nancy Green, global practice lead for healthcare strategy and thought leadership at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, […]