The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) CIO Jose Arrieta said Accelerate will be able to save the department “somewhere around $33 to $40 million” over the next five years.
Accelerate – the first block-chain based program in the Federal government to get an authority-to-operate – will help HHS lessen the administrative burden in addition to its cost-saving capabilities, Arietta said today at the AFCEA Health IT Summit.
Using this tool, Arietta says, will allow HHS to manage licenses and save on operating costs through having conversations with industry partners to keep costs down by building microservices into the blockchain portal.
Going forward in 2020, HHS is also going to place a heavy emphasis on cybersecurity. Arrieta made note that the healthcare industry in the United States is a major target for adversaries given the large quantities of data and information that is collected.
Prioritizing machine learning to analyze the troves of data that HHS collects will assist the agency in cybersecurity by also freeing up subject-matter experts to focus on maintaining the cybersecurity posture of the systems.
These efforts in 2020 will help HHS maintain a customer-focused approach to operations. Arrieta said that getting customer savings through the department’s efforts in cutting layers of overhead is a 2020 priority.
