White House

See the following -

Brokers Use ‘Billions’ Of Data Points To Profile Americans

Craig Timberg, | The Washington Post | May 27, 2014

...information and much, much more is being quietly collected, analyzed and distributed by the nation’s burgeoning data-broker industry, which uses billions of individual data points to produce detailed portraits of virtually every American consumer, the Federal Trade Commission reported Tuesday...

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Budget Plan Gives VA Big Funding Boost For Veterans Care

Patricia Kime | Marine Corps Times | April 10, 2013

The Veterans Affairs Department does not appear to be feeling the pinch of fiscal austerity in President Obama’s 2014 budget proposal: The White House has proposed a 10.2 percent boost in funding for VA next year, totaling $66.5 billion in discretionary spending. Read More »

CES 2019 In Vegas to Feature Patient-Centric Open Health IT Innovations

CES is the world's gathering place for all those who thrive on the business of consumer technologies. It has served as the proving ground for innovators and breakthrough technologies for 50 years - the global stage where next-generation innovations are introduced to the marketplace. This year's conference has a health and wellness track as well as many health IT vendors in the exhibit. One of the most significant announcements will be the release of iBlueButton 8 by Humetrix. Blue Button is one of the core elements of the White House open source health IT strategy that we wrote about here. Humetrix has developed a mobile health platform and the latest version will be unveiled at the conference.

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Chopra Resigns From White House

Mary Mosquera | Government Health IT | January 27, 2012

Aneesh Chopra, the federal government’s first chief technology officer and assistant to the president, has resigned, the White House announced Jan. 27. He is expected to leave in early February. Read More »

Citing Anthrax And Smallpox Scares, White House Tells Federal Labs To Take Stock

Rebecca Carroll | Nextgov.com | August 28, 2014

After recent mishandling of potentially deadly pathogens, the White House is urging all federal laboratories to conduct what it is calling a “safety stand-down,” security and science officials announced Thursday.  Agencies that handle infectious agents or toxins have been asked to complete overviews of their programs within 30 days of a memo dated Aug. 18...

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Clueless or Craven? The White House Gets the VA Story Exactly Backwards

Sad to say, the Obama administration seems clueless about what might be broken at the VA and how to fix it. Either that, or it is just cravenly saying and doing whatever it thinks is necessary to make the story go away. Evidence for the clueless hypothesis came on Friday, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors weighed in with his diagnosis (pdf) of what ails the VA. The document is extraordinary in its contradictions, sloppy formulations, and non-evidence-based conclusions.

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CMS Goes Live with Blue Button - With Life and Cost Saving Applications for 53 Million Americans to Use

On August 13 at the White House in Washington, D.C., the Office of American Innovation and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will host the first Blue Button 2.0 conference. This event will highlight CMS’ strong investment and leadership in Blue Button as a patient driven means for interoperability, cost-effective care and patient safety. Eight years after President Obama’s announcement of the Blue Button initiative to give Veterans, military beneficiaries and Medicare beneficiaries “easy access to their health information” with the use of a “Blue Button”, CMS Administrator Seema Verma took action with “Blue Button 2.0” so that 53 million Medicare beneficiaries can now make use of CMS approved patient facing Blue Button applications, turning a four-year history of claim data into actionable longitudinal health records to prevent costly medical errors, unnecessary redundant care or other harmful and wasteful care.

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Data Innovation, Crowdsourcing On The Horizon For Innovation Fellows Program

Shefali Kapadia | Federal News Radio | April 3, 2014

After the first two rounds of the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program showed marked success, the White House announced applications are open for Round 3 of the program.  "We are accepting applications right now through April 7," said Jennifer Pahlka, deputy chief technology officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and one of the executives that runs the PIF program.

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Designer Fund And The White House Challenge You To Redesign The Electronic Medical Record

Josh Constine | TechCrunch | November 13, 2012

Hey designers! You could build another app. Or you could save some lives by entering the White House’s Health Design Challenge to give the electronic medical record a much-needed redesign...If you can do better, you could win $25K and get your design rolled out to 6 million VA patients and open sourced for all the world’s doctors. Read More »

Digital Government Milestone Passes In Silence

Frank Konkel | FCW | December 5, 2012

The six-month milestone since the White House released its Digital Government Strategy has come and gone with little fanfare. Read More »

DOD, VA Pressed On Creating Electronic Medical Records

Leo Shane III | Stars and Stripes | July 10, 2013

Lawmakers on Wednesday lamented stagnation in creating lifelong electronic medical records for troops and veterans, decrying a lack of leadership on the issue from the Defense Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the White House. Read More »

Ending Campus Sexual Assault—For Good

Sarah Berlin | In These Times | May 20, 2014

Five years ago, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) published a series of groundbreaking reports on how U.S. colleges handle sexual violence. The investigation found that survivors faced a “depressing litany of barriers” to reporting assaults and that assailants rarely receive serious punishments...

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Energy Datapalooza: Open Data From The U.S. Department Of Energy

Steven Chu, Todd Park, and Nancy Sutley | Clean Technica | October 1, 2012

Imagine it is a scorching hot summer day, and your smart phone beeps, asking if you’d like it to raise your home thermostat a degree or two to save money.  Or, envision an easy-to-use software package that lets a building owner perform virtual energy audits at a fraction of the cost of in-person audits, so real savings are calculated instantly, building upgrades launched sooner, and construction jobs created faster. Read More »

FASTR Ensures that Publicly Funded Research Belongs to the Public

When taxpayers pay for research, everyone should have access to it. That’s the simple premise of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act of 2015 (S.779, H.R.1477), or FASTR. If enacted, FASTR would keep federally funded research where it belongs, in the hands of the public. Under FASTR, every federal agency that spends more than $100 million on grants for research would be required to adopt an open access policy. Although the bill gives each agency some leeway in adopting a policy appropriate to the types of research it funds, each one would require that published research be available to the public no later than six months after publication.

Feds Look to Big Data to Position 'Government as a Platform'

Kenneth Corbin | CIO | January 15, 2013

Just as the federal government has been working to hasten its shift to cloud computing over the past few years, senior technology officials are now seeking to advance a framework for the government's approach to the challenges and opportunities presented by big data.

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