FCW Workshop: Innovations in Health IT

As the largest integrated healthcare network in the United States, the Department of Veterans Affairs is tasked with caring for our nation's veterans. As a result, they have had to overcome their share of challenges over the past decade. The pandemic forced them to change the way they provide patient experience, disruptions in the supply chain changed the way they provide tools, equipment, medicine and technology to their providers and patients, and the integration of electronic health records is changing the way VA is providing care to our nation's veterans. In this exclusive interview, explore how the VA has been implementing emerging health technologies to better tackle all these challenges and continue to provide the best care for our nation’s veterans.

State health agencies are often tasked with the administration of public health surveillance to identify spikes and outbreak of disease infection, and to identify potential carriers of communicable diseases.  The diversity of data formats and inconsistent quality impacts the ability to reconcile this and thus contain disease spread. This presentation will present an approach to solving this problem by leveraging a Health Data Hub pattern to gain a 360 degree view of the patient, as well as identify infection and potential co-infection partners in HIV/STD data.

Health information exchanges are widely used in the industry to improve continuity of care, avoid clinical errors as well as improving the cost, quality and safety of patient care. In a landmark event for Veteran health care, the VA has begun using its new electronic health record (EHR) system to improve the health care experience for Veterans. In this session, hear from the Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office’s Deputy Chief Information Officer, Laura Prietula, about how this new initiative enables doctors to easily access a veteran's full medical history in one place, without having to track down information such as pharmacy or laboratory records.

The IT infrastructure is the foundation for everything that happens in a health organization. While many health IT strategies can support success, ensuring that an organization has scalable, flexible, and future-proof tools reduces the possibility of being stuck with outdated capabilities. Open source software is one promising way that healthcare organizations can enjoy the flexibility and scalability of their IT infrastructure, while also participating in the latest IT innovations. In this session, hear from CMS’s Executive Director of the Digital Service, Andrea Fletcher, about CMS’ open source goals, projects, and future plans.

During this session, NITAAC Deputy Director Ricky Clark will provide an overview of the highly anticipated CIO-SP4 GWAC, detail how it differs from the CIO-SP3 GWAC and discuss how it can help federal agencies streamline their Health IT procurements.

Digital transformation can enable health care providers, researchers, and public health professionals to make better informed decisions. Programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) use big data, analytics and machine learning (ML) methods to provide health officials with an early warning system for pandemic preparedness and address health risks such as suicide, opioid overdoses, influenza and natural disasters. Hear from CDC Chief Data Officer Dr. Alan Sim as he talks about the agency's lessons learned from the pandemic and data modernization efforts to rebuild and improve the public health infrastructure to ensure that the data they collect can be consolidated, reused, and disseminated so that public health professionals, researchers and policymakers can continue to make better decisions.