Just weeks before senior officials at the Veterans Health Administration ordered the launch of a new Online Health Care Application through Vets.gov, a senior policy adviser at the White House warned VHA officials that the new app had not been cleared by agency lawyers because of legal and technical issues that, ultimately, affected veteran enrollment across the nation.
Federal agencies have increased the amount of money they spend on outdated IT systems, according to a study from the International Data Corporation.
In his Monday report on the status of the White House Cancer Moonshot, Vice President Joe Biden listed big data and data sharing as key components in today’s fight against cancer.
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.
In August, as President Barack Obama stood in front of the Disabled American Veterans Convention and publicly hailed the success of a new health care enrollment app on Vets.gov, the system had actually been spinning out of control for months, losing thousands of applications, locking records, and allowing officials to mark veterans ineligible for benefits without legal justification, according to hundreds of pages of internal documents obtained by MeriTalk.
The Department of Veterans Affairs announced that the Department of Homeland Security and Hiring our Heroes have teamed up to offer free online, on-demand cybersecurity training to government employees and veterans via DHS’ Federal Virtual Training Environment.
Federal agencies are putting increasing amounts of time and resources into providing telemedicine for American veterans.
A software upgrade gone wrong caused widespread system outages across the Veterans Affairs Department, officials confirmed Tuesday. The agency’s main website, VA.gov, as well as Vets.gov, associated websites, and apps were temporarily affected, a VA spokesperson told MeriTalk.
The Obama administration this month announced a series of new investments, partnerships, and policies to further the Precision Medicine Initiative, including $55 million in awards from the National Institutes of Health.
The Department of Veterans Affairs this week appointed two veteran government IT leaders to key agency posts responsible for data sharing with the Defense Department and cybersecurity.
It’s one of the centerpieces of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ transformation effort. But the so-called strategic sourcing initiative has some front-line IT employees worried that it’s really just a code word for outsourcing their jobs to the private sector. Strategic sourcing is at the heart of VA’s new IT enterprise strategy, and leverages the […]
The White House announced that it’s launching the Data Driven Justice initiative, which intends to use data to decrease prison recidivism and improve response and care for at-risk and mentally ill citizens.
The Department of Veterans Affairs misused $51.9 million in medical appropriations to fund development of mobile health applications and an enhancement to the Veteran Information Systems and Technology Architecture, violating Federal appropriations law, according to a preliminary inspector general report obtained by MeriTalk. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs has been consumed with transformation for the past 21 months, attempting to change from what Secretary Robert McDonald has privately described as a “Kremlinesque” culture to a high performing organization that puts veterans in control of their healthcare. That transformation effort, known as MyVA, is McDonald’s direct response to the […]
Brian Burns, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ chief information security officer, has resigned, according to an internal agency memo obtained by MeriTalk.
Congress has passed an appropriations bill to fund increased medical care for military veterans–particularly women–a burgeoning contingent of the vet population. The bill contains language that presses the VA to improve health care for female veterans by considering the launch of a mobile health care pilot program.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has contracted software company Ad Hoc to provide support for its Vets.gov site, which is designed to consolidate all of VA’s services in one area.
Department of Veterans Affairs Chief Information Officer LaVerne Council announced that Susan McHugh-Polley, the official who led the development of the VA’s enterprise cybersecurity strategy, is now the permanent deputy assistant secretary for Service, Delivery, and Engineering.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is on what appears to be an irreversible losing streak when it comes to its annual cybersecurity audit. Last week, VA’s Office of the Inspector General slapped the agency with a “material weakness” designation for its information security efforts—the 16th year in a row that VA has failed the annual […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs announced additional leadership and organizational changes throughout the Office of Information and Technology. Tina Burnette, the long-serving executive director for enterprise risk management, has been selected for the Senior Executive Service and will take over as executive director of the Field Security Service within the Office of Information Security.
Arthur L. Gonzalez, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for IT and the deputy chief information officer for service, delivery, and engineering since 2013, will resign from his post March 5.
The FDA’s new cybersecurity guidelines may not be enough to keep medical devices safe, according to two Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology authors.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is moving aggressively to institute a new system to plan and manage IT projects, effectively replacing the agile development methodology championed by former chief information officers Roger Baker and Stephen Warren. VA CIO LaVerne Council told a MyVA Advisory Committee meeting last week that she has hired the second of three senior executives to lead the new IT Account Management organization.
The Veterans Benefits Administration is falling short in the way it is managing the progress of its Veteran’s Benefits Management System (VBMS), a system that was responsible for processing $63 billion in claims in 2014, Valerie Melvin, director of information technology at the Government Accountability Office, told the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.
A MeriTalk survey finds that Federal agencies are in need of an efficiency jump-start, and 78 percent of Feds believe DevOps will help agencies innovate faster responses and services. Legacy systems are slowing agencies down, and new apps just add to the inertia.
The 34-page Protected Health Information (PHI) Data Breach Report analyzed 392 million security incidents and 1,931 data breaches, including breaches at the Department of Health and Human Services and a “significant number of records” from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The Department of Veterans Affairs awarded a little-known contract Tuesday for virtual reality software that could one day have a dramatic impact on the ability of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to deal with the various symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In a relatively small contract of just $77,496, the VA partnered with the […]
Department of Veterans Affairs Chief Information Officer LaVerne Council announced Nov. 6 that Brian Burns has accepted an offer to become the agency’s next chief information security officer. Burns takes over for Dan Galik, who has served as acting CISO since Stan Lowe retired in August. Burns will also continue in his role as deputy […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs appointed Brian Burns to lead its new Enterprise Cybersecurity Strategy.
A new study mandated by Congress in the wake of the secret waiting list scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs has uncovered significant evidence that the department’s IT leaders have for years failed to meet the technology needs of clinical professionals treating veterans on the front lines and that those IT failures, along with […]