Tag Archives: Cloud Computing

Five Steps Toward Digital Transformation at the Department of Veterans Affairs

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The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is keenly focused on improving the healthcare and general services that support our military veterans. Incumbent on these improvements is the integration of leading edge technologies that digitize and automate processes for efficiency along with important security enhancements.

 

 

ONE: Implementation of Electronic Health Records

The Department's efforts to modernize the way they store and access records for the nine million veterans they care for into a comprehensive electronic system has been well documented. These efforts involve upgrading all 1200+ VA facilities' existing systems to ensure better continuity of care, and are currently focused on moving EHR data to a cloud system that will be interoperable with the Military Health System. The ultimate goal is to ensure service members can seamlessly and digitally transition from DOD to VA health care, instead of needing to carry around stacks of paper forms as is current practice.

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Coordination is Key to CDO Success

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Chief Data Officers (CDOs) are one of the newer positions in government, but their role is quickly becoming one of the most critical. A CDO is charged with overseeing data-related functions, including data management, ensuring data quality, and creating data strategy. For government agencies, this requires close coordination with the Federal Data Strategy and the DoD Data Strategy.

Both of these documents define the specific roles and responsibilities of data officers and provide a framework for working with and securing data. Of course, each agency has unique requirements and missions, leaving the CDO to work out how to apply this guidance and standards to their organization.

Agencies are meeting these guidelines and integrating CDOs in different ways. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently announced a department-level CDO office to better integrate data into its operations and those of other agencies. The need for this level of coordination was underscored as DHS launched a department-wide COVID-19 vaccination campaign in partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs health centers. DHS needed to identify, contact and manage responses from workers, which meant collecting and reconciling many different datasets from across the department.

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Putting a Value on Trust — Introducing Zero Trust Security Approaches

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With so many high-profile hacks this year, it's easy to want to throw up your hands and say, "Is there nothing that can be trusted?!" Interestingly, that lament is what is driving the latest approach to cybersecurity -- zero trust. Zero trust is what it sounds like, a security approach centered on the belief that organizations should not automatically trust anything accessing their systems either inside or outside their perimeters. Instead, all people and devices must be verified before access is granted. To the untrained eye, this seems untenable. How, in this day and age, when we depend on digital information and connection to do most anything, can we use a process where we have to constantly verify identity and access permissions? Luckily, the practice of zero trust is more sophisticated than its premise.

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Federally Focused Technology Event Calendar: A reference for enterprise CTOs

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Originally postes by  on FedCyber.com

There are dozens of technology related events every single week. Even with recent decisions aimed at cutting back on the number of events that the government is involved with, industry, academia and even government continues to have a strong need for bringing people together to work on hard problems. Which means there are still an incredible number of events in the government space. Our friends at GovEvents do a terrific job of capturing government-focused events and can help people find the right event to engage with. We can contribute to your decision making as well, especially if you are a technologist.

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