Government Accountability Office (GAO)

See the following -

Medicare Paid Doctors, Hospitals $6.3 Billion To Adopt E-Health Records

Bob Brewin | Nextgov | October 24, 2013

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services paid out $6.3 billion to hospitals and medical professionals in 2012 to adopt electronic health record systems, the Government Accountability Office reported Thursday. Read More »

More Aggressive Oversight Of Agency FOIA Compliance Is Needed, GAO Says

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | September 10, 2013

The government ombudsman for evaluating agencies’ compliance with the Freedom of Information Act should be more aggressive, a congressional auditor said on Tuesday. Read More »

New Federal Database Will Track Americans' Credit Ratings, Other Financial Information

Richard Pollock | Washington Examiner | May 30, 2014

As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives -- including their Social Security numbers -- in a new national database being assembled by two federal agencies.  

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New US Digital Service Looks to Avoid IT Catastrophes

Alex Howard | TechPresident | August 13, 2014

The second initiative went live on Monday, when the White House formally launched a United States Digital Service (USDS) and published an open source Digital Services Playbook and a “TechFAR,” a part of the guide that “highlights the flexibilities in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) that can help agencies implement ‘plays’ from the Digital Services Playbook.” Read More »

No Existing Technology Can Ensure Drone Safety, GAO Official Says

Bob Brewin | Nextgov | February 19, 2013

No suitable technology currently exists to ensure that drones will “sense and avoid” other aircraft, Gerald Dillingham of the Government Accountability Office recently told lawmakers, adding that the Federal Aviation Administration lacks sufficient dedicated frequency spectrum to operate unmanned aircraft systems in domestic airspace. Read More »

Numbers Don't Lie: Patent Trolls Are A Plague

Simon Phipps | InfoWorld | October 19, 2012

Recent research supports view that patent troll activity is rising -- costing America a fortune in wasted legal fees and lost jobs Read More »

Obamacare Website Has Cost $840 Million

Sam Baker | Nextgov.com | July 30, 2014

The Obama administration has spent roughly $840 million on HealthCare.gov, including more than $150 million just in cost overruns for the version that failed so badly when it launched last year...

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OMB Should Improve IT Investment Guidance, Watchdog Says

Joseph Marks | NextGov | October 26, 2011

The Office of Management and Budget should give federal agencies better guidance on what counts as an information technology investment and what doesn't and demand more information on what they're doing to reduce duplicative IT spending, a watchdog said Wednesday. Read More »

Only 12% Of Docs Meet Meaningful Use Rules

David Pittman | MedPage Today | February 20, 2013

Just over 12% of about 509,000 eligible physicians said they met requirements for meaningful use incentives for electronic health records (EHRs), early study results show. Read More »

Overdue Outbreak Detection System Leaves Patchwork Defense

Madison Alder | Bloomberg | July 30, 2019

The U.S. should have had a nationwide network to monitor for the next viral outbreak or biological threat a decade ago. It still doesn't. Instead, public health leaders make do with a patchwork system while waiting for the Department of Health and Human Services races to get its integrated network in service by a new 2023 congressional deadline. Until that nationwide monitoring system is in place, the U.S. runs the risk that a biological threat like a disease outbreak will take hold before it's noticed. "The risk is that we don't have the level of surveillance that we need. The risk is that there are things basically flying under the radar," said Helen Boucher, an infectious diseases clinician at Tufts Medical Center in Boston and director of the university's Center for Integrated Management of Antimicrobial Resistance.

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Oversight Holds Hearing Tuesday On Wasteful IT Spending

Press Release | Oversight and Government Reform Committee | January 17, 2013

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has called a hearing next Tuesday at 1 p.m. focusing on the wasteful and dysfunctional fashion in which the federal government acquires information technology (IT) systems and services. Read More »

Panetta, Shinseki Acknowledge Frustration in Streamling Military Health Care

Staff Writer | Washington Post | July 26, 2012

Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta and Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki acknowledged Wednesday that they have been frustrated by departmental bureaucracy in their attempts to streamline military health care for severely wounded service members. Read More »

Plug and Play Healthcare: Open Middleware and the Emergence of a Functional Interoperability Framework

“A middleware architecture has been shown to be the best technological solution for addressing the problem of EHR interoperability. The middleware platform facilitates the transparent, yet secure, access of patient health data, directly from the various databases where it is stored. A server-based middleware framework supporting access to the various patient health data stores allows for a scalable, unified and standardized platform for applications to be developed upon.  The middleware architectural design has been successfully used to link data from multiple databases, irrespective to the database platform or where the database is located,” says Voltz. Read More »

Policy Conflicts Hurt Defense-VA Collaboration On Healthcare: GAO

Jessica Zigmond | ModernHealthcare.com | September 29, 2012

"Incompatible policies" in several areas are preventing the U.S. Defense and Veterans Affairs departments from collaborating effectively at sites where the two healthcare systems deliver care, a federal audit has concluded. Read More »

PwC-Led Team To Offer 'Open Source' EHR To DoD

Marla Durben Hirsch | Fierce EMR | September 8, 2014

PwC has joined forces with Medsphere, DSS, Inc. and General Dynamics Information Technology to vie for the coveted U.S. Department of Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization (DHMSM) electronic health record contract, and plans to merge "open source" software with commercial applications in its proposal, PwC has announced...

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