Government Accountability Office (GAO)

See the following -

HealthCare.gov Official: Expect Glitches In November

Rebecca Carroll | Nextgov.com | July 31, 2014

There will be hiccups, but the federal online marketplace for health insurance plans is in a far better position to handle the open enrollment period that begins Nov. 15, a top official said Thursday...

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HealthCare.gov To Be Run By Connecticut Exchange Leader

Darius Tahir | Modern Healthcare | August 26, 2014

The leader of one of the most successful state-based insurance exchanges will head to Washington to become CEO of the federal marketplace. The CMS named Connecticut's Kevin Counihan to the newly created post on Tuesday...

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House Backs IT Buying Overhaul

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | June 14, 2013

The House on Friday passed a bipartisan plan to overhaul the way the government purchases and manages information technology, as part of a major defense policy bill. House members agreed to add a version of the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act on a voice vote early Friday and passed the full bill shortly after 1 p.m. Read More »

House Blasts 'U-Turn' On iEHR Project

Dan Bowman | FierceEMR | February 28, 2013

House Veterans' Affairs Committee members had some harsh words for VA and Department of Defense officials at a hearing on Wednesday for altering their approach to forming an integrated electronic health record, calling the move "a step backward." Read More »

House Subcommittee Questions Cybersecurity at Power Networks

Josh Smith | Nextgov | February 28, 2012

While new computer technology has made power grids more effective, systems designed to secure those networks from cyberattacks continue to lag, Government Accountability Office officials told a House subcommittee on Tuesday. Read More »

House: $1B Wasted On Vets’ Medical E-Records

Mitchell Armentrout | Marine Corps Times | February 28, 2013

The departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have wasted about $1 billion in a failed effort to streamline medical record-keeping, the chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee said in a hearing Wednesday. Read More »

How Healthcare.gov Went Wrong

Staff Writer | Department of Better Technology (DOBT) | October 10, 2013

Here at DOBT we talk a lot about How To Fix Procurement, but you don’t hear a lot about why things go wrong. The Healthcare.gov Fiasco is instructive in that it highlights every piece of our procurement process that’s broken. How, with a half-trillion dollar a year spend, could something like this botch even happen? Here’s how: Read More »

iEHR Time Frame 'Optimistic And Uncertain'

David Perera | FierceGovernmentIT | September 30, 2012

The 4 to 6 years Veterans Affairs Department officials have projected as the time necessary to build out a nationwide integrated electronic health record with the Defense Department is "both optimistic and uncertain," the Government Accountability Office says iEHR officials told them. Read More »

Integrated Health Record Effort Adds To VA's Troubles

Amber Corrin | FCW | May 2, 2013

The Integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR) program is not the Department of Veterans Affairs' only lightning rod, but it is a major one. Officially in the works since 2011, the records-sharing program took root after 15 years of discussion and cooperation between the two agencies to share military members' health data. Read More »

IRS Illegally Gave Taxpayer Data To The FBI In 2010, Republicans Say

Aliya Sternstein | Nextgov.com | June 9, 2014

The IRS sent the FBI a huge database containing sensitive taxpayer information on nonprofit conservative groups, possibly in violation of federal law, House Republicans allege. The lawmakers claim the transfer was part of an intentional effort to potentially probe the organizations for illegal campaign activities...

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Is the Technology Gap the Reason Why Medical Errors are the 3rd Leading Cause of Death in the US?

Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of an information technology (IT) mess in the United States that seems like an endless round of the old radio show joke contest, “Can You Top This” except that increasingly the joke is on us. From nuclear weapons updated with floppy disks, to critical financial systems in the Department of the Treasury that run on assembler language code (a computer language initially used in the 1950s and typically tied to the hardware for which it was developed), to medical systems that cannot exchange patient records leading to a large number of needless deaths from medical errors.

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Is the US Finally Ready to Get Serious About Biodefense?

Biological and other disaster threats - whether accidental, driven by forces of nature, or intentional - pose fairly grave risks to the United States and the world. Situational awareness has been a conspicuous topic ever since the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed shortly thereafter. Since then we have experienced numerous disasters: health impacts of major weather events such as hurricanes and earthquakes, new virus outbreaks like Ebola in Africa, raging wildfires on the West Coast (I live in California), and the ever-present threat of pandemic flu which a hundred years ago infected some 500 million people across the globe and killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, according to the Center for Disease Control and Preparedness (CDC). But since the initial flurry of public health preparedness funds in the ensuing several years after the 9/11 attacks, this topic has not had a high priority at CDC nor the funding necessary to implement it successfully.

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IT Projects May Not Be Getting Enough Oversight

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | November 16, 2012

The White House should do a better job of tracking whether agencies’ major technology projects are at risk of going off the rails and agencies should perform more oversight on their operations and maintenance spending, according to two recent watchdog reports. Read More »

Lawmaker Wants To Cut Backlog On Veterans' Claims

Ledyard King | USA Today | February 11, 2013

The Florida Republican who chairs the House Veterans Affairs Committee wants to speed up the time it takes to process veterans' disability claims. Read More »

Lawmakers Grill Federal CIO On Data Center Figures

Wyatt Kash | InformationWeek Government | July 26, 2013

Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel, speaking before a House subcommittee Thursday, defended the Office of Management and Budget's sudden acknowledgement that the number of federal data centers now totaled more than 7,000, more than twice the number that had been reported as recently as May. Read More »