The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is in the final stages of planning for its transition to a commercial electronic health record (EHR) system, but faces congressional concern on two fronts: the agency’s inability to reliably define costs for the existing VistA system, and its estimate of $4.8 billion to maintain the system throughout the EHR transition effort. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is looking for support for its Chief Data Officer as the department looks to improve its data practices and standards. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs announced its intention to expand its artificial intelligence (AI) research activities, naming Dr. Gil Alterovitz, as the agency’s first director of artificial intelligence. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is on track to achieve its agency goal under the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) of improving veteran customer experience (CX), according to a June update released by the VA. […]
Veterans submitted 3,000 benefits compensation claims using the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA’s) new Disability Compensation Claim Tool in the first month of the tool’s launch and have reported positive experiences using it, the VA announced in a June 13 news release. […]
In light of the increasing ubiquity of data breaches, Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report today recommending that Federal agencies should discontinue knowledge-based verification to strengthen their remote identity proofing processes and that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) should provide guidance in creating alternative identity proofing methods. […]
While auditing for potential violations of contracting regulations, the Inspector General (IG) for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) found weaknesses in the administration of the $22.3 billion Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology Next Generation (T4NG) contract. […]
The House Committee on Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization met today to discuss the implementation of Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DoD). […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) cited IT problems as an “ongoing obstacle” to the VA serving its mission in its semiannual report to Congress, publicly released May 30. […]
Members of two House Veterans Affairs subcommittees sharply criticized Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) officials at a hearing on Wednesday, May 23 for the agency’s failure to keep up with expanding IT requirements for VA’s popular Caregivers program, which provides a range of services for post-9/11 wounded veterans. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is looking to standardize a national crowdsourced tool in the department after it reported having success in driving efficiency across VA healthcare centers. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Energy, Veterans Affairs (VA), U.S. Army, and U.S. Navy inappropriately awarded 1,849 contracts to businesses that had tax debts in 2015 and 2016. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has added customer experience (CX) to its Core Values and Characteristics guidelines – a move that indicates that VA will prioritize CX in its mission. […]
The Department for Veterans Affairs (VA) highlighted the efficiency and magnitude that a crowdsourced tool has brought to the agency’s healthcare, human resource, benefits, and financial systems in a blog post last week. […]
The Defense Department’s (DoD) most senior leadership faced the wrath of one of the House Appropriations Committee’s most senior members today over what Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., a former chairman of the committee, regards as slow progress toward the goal of efficiently linking electronic health records (EHR) systems used by DoD and the Veterans Affairs Department (VA). […]
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. […]
To make cybersecurity more effective in Federal healthcare, security professionals need to bring a broad swath of folks to the table to build security into technology from the beginning while still enabling the mission, said a panel of Federal chief information security officers and cybersecurity leaders at ACT-IAC’s Health Security, Privacy, and Practice Forum on April 23. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) today critiqued the lack of IT interoperability, among other shortfalls, in the Departments of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Health and Human Services’ Indian Health Service (IHS) memorandum of understanding (MOU) to improve healthcare for American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) veterans. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is continuing with its electronic health record (EHR) modernization effort, and a notice posted today on FedBizOpps shows that VA is preparing to migrate data from its existing VistA system to its new commercial platform. […]
As part of an aggressive cloud migration plan, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is aiming to move 350 apps – or about half the department’s portfolio – to the cloud by 2024, said VA CIO James Gfrerer today at ACT-IAC’s Health Innovation Day 2019. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) wrote to Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie on March 28 to update the agency on the implementation status of GAO’s prior IT management recommendations for the VA, and prodded VA to take action on benefits management system issues and data center optimization goals. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has made strides in increasing digital access to veteran healthcare data over the past year, from the launch of its new portal last November to its plans to expand telehealth services, and those efforts have shown measurable progress. […]
In the wake of a critical report on the implementation of the MISSION Act by the U.S. Digital Service, officials from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) offered assurances to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs that the program is on track and veterans will see no disruption in care. […]
The House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization held its first hearing of the year today with hopes of getting a baseline reading from the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Information and Technology (VA OIT) – but with no OIT representation, the committee went ahead and discussed the department’s challenges with panelists from VA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO). […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is looking to small business for help in its $16 billion move to a new electronic health record (EHR) system, as the department announced its intention to host business engagements on the topic last week. […]
The Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that allegations of an Office of Information Security Office of Information and Technology (OIT) employee steering two contract awards to a company were unsubstantiated in a report Friday. […]
With numerous past Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) IT modernization efforts falling short and attracting scrutiny, the head of the department told lawmakers that VA is fully embracing the cloud during a Senate Veterans Affairs hearing today. […]
The Department of Veteran Affairs’ (VA’s) Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) failure to modify its electronic systems to fully support the Forever GI Bill hampered efforts to implement the law early in the process and continue to the present day, according to a VA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report released today. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs has made progress in meeting Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) requirements, but still needs to work on most of the recommendations from previous years, a new FISMA audit released last week found. […]
Amid discussions of data governance at an IBM Think Gov panel yesterday, Department of Homeland Security Data Manager Col. John Scott explained an interagency predictive analytics program in development between the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veteran Affairs (VA). […]