Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)

See the following -

White House Marks Digital Gov Strategy’s First Milestones

David Hubler | GCN | August 24, 2012

Federal agencies are making “great strides” toward meeting President Barack Obama’s May 23 directive, “Building a 21st Century Digital Government” during the next year, Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel said in marking the first quarterly anniversary of the initiative. Read More »

White House Names New Federal CTO

J. Nicholas Hoover | Information Week | March 9, 2012

...Park has been one of the foremost advocates of open government within the Obama administration. He has called for the creation of a healthcare data clearinghouse and speaks regularly on open government-related issues. Park has said that he sees open government as a way to make government work better. "The ultimate measure of success should be improvement in the fundamental efficiency and effectiveness of government," he said in a 2010 interview with InformationWeek...

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Why A ‘Tech Surge’ Isn’t Going To Save HealthCare.gov

Christina Farr | VentureBeat | October 22, 2013

Over the weekend, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services promised it would recruit the ”best and brightest” to fix HealthCare.gov, the federal government’s online insurance marketplace that’s part of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), which has been plagued by technical defects... Read More »

Why AMA Supports Dr. Price to Lead HHS

Press Release | American Medical Association | December 1, 2016

The AMA supports the nomination of Dr. Tom Price based on decades of interactions with him as a member of the AMA House of Delegates, Georgia state senator and as a member of the House of Representatives since 2005.  Over these years, there have been important policy issues on which we agreed (medical liability reform) and others on which we disagreed (passage of the Affordable Care Act). Two things that have been consistent are his understanding of the many challenges facing patients and physicians today, and his willingness to listen directly to concerns expressed by the AMA and other physician organizations...

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Why Delaying Obamacare Has Insurers Freaking Out

Sam Baker | Nextgov | October 31, 2013

The health insurance industry already had plenty to freak out about with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Simply complying with the law is a massive undertaking, never mind the terrible HealthCare.gov debut. But the botched rollout has produced a new source of anxiety for insurers: the growing bipartisan support for delaying parts of the act’s implementation. Read More »

Why Did Healthcare.gov's Source Code Mysteriously Vanish From Public View?

Greg Sandoval | The Verge | October 14, 2013

One of the few trouble-free areas on Healthcare.gov is the site's front end — the information pages where visitors can learn about health plans available under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In contrast to the glitchy backend systems that have prevented many of the more than 14 million visitors from shopping for health insurance the past two weeks, [these pages...] were built on open-source code. Now, that code doesn't appear to be so open. Read More »

Why Didn't The White House Use WordPress?

Dylan Byers | POLITICO | October 24, 2013

HealthCare.gov is "a disaster," "a failure" and "excruciatingly embarrassing" for the Obama administration. Why didn't they just use WordPress? Read More »

Why Healthcare.gov Sucks? Because They Hired Political Cronies, Not Internet Native Companies To Build It

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | October 10, 2013

There's been plenty of talk lately about just how screwed up the launch of Healthcare.gov has been. While any massively large-scale internet launch is likely to suffer some problems, the level of disaster on this particular project has been quite impressive. This has led some to wonder why this happened [...]. Read More »

Why Obama’s Tech-Savvy Team Couldn’t Make Obamacare Glitch-Free

Juliet Eilperin | Washington Post | October 9, 2013

As the online rollout of the Affordable Care Act continues to be plagued by glitches, many of the president’s allies and foes are wondering the same thing: how could the most tech-savvy White House in history launch a flawed Web site? Read More »

Why States Are Doing Obamacare Better

Sam Baker | Nextgov | October 24, 2013

A small—and somewhat surprising—handful of states are implementing Obamacare much more effectively than the Obama administration. Read More »

Why Suicide Prevention Is Part of Population Health Strategy

Paul B. Hofmann and Jerry Reed | Hospitals & Health Networks | May 9, 2016

As hospitals and health systems recognize the need to devote more time and attention to population health management and improving community health, more effort correspondingly must be focused on behavioral health services. In response, the American Hospital Association has launched an initiative to assist hospitals with behavioral health...

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Why the Healthcare.gov Launch of Obamacare Was Doomed To Fail

Adrianne Jeffries | The Verge | October 8, 2013

The more we learn about the development of Healthcare.gov, the worse the situation looks. The site has been serving myriad errors since it launched [...]. While the administration is claiming a 50 percent reduction in wait times after adding new servers, other serious issues persist. Read More »

Why US Government IT Fails So Hard, So Often

Sean Gallagher | Ars Technica | October 10, 2013

The rocky launch of the Department of Health and Human Services' HealthCare.gov is the most visible evidence at the moment of how hard it is for the federal government to execute major technology projects. But the troubled "Obamacare" IT system—which uses systems that aren't connected in any way to the federal IT infrastructure—is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the government's IT problems. Read More »

World Health Care Congress: HHS CTO, Premier CIO Talk Data Liquidity

David Raths | Healthcare Informatics | April 10, 2013

This week’s 10th Annual World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C., saw a lively discussion April 9 involving a panel of experts on innovation, including Bryan Sivak, chief technology officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Joe Pleasant Jr., senior vice president and CIO of the Premier health alliance. Read More »

Your Money or Your PHI: HHS Issues New Guidance on Ransomware

Jocelyn Samuels | HHS Blog | July 11, 2016

To help health care entities better understand and respond to the threat of ransomware, the HHS Office for Civil Rights has released new HIPAA guidance. One of the biggest current threats to health information privacy is the serious compromise of the integrity and availability of data caused by malicious cyber-attacks on electronic health information systems, such as through ransomware. The FBI has reported an increase in ransomware attacks and media have reported a number of ransomware attacks on hospitals...

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