This is a continuation of the first announcement where the White House put a “hold” on certain projects. I am guessing too that much of this will revolve around the financial side of IT. Transactional analysis in healthcare certainly needs an overhaul as we all pay big time. Insurers use 3rd parties and sometime they create them and for each level of data analysis the claim passes through there’s a charge. 3rd party companies that provide this service are making millions and billions and yet we need these services but not at those profit levels as we all pay.
Rules on EHR Certification Should Take Back Seat to Certifying Insurance Algorithms At Present – We Need This First
Payment algorithms from insurance carriers should be certified just like medical record software and we are only doing half the job there.
We certainly need auditing but not at the current expense levels we are seeing with software opportunities arising to claim yet one more piece of the pie. This is huge throughout healthcare and they sell everyone on the fact that it will help save money, when it fact it does not, it just creates profits for a piece of the pie.
Ultimately this system builds on itself with more software being created to find out where duplicate efforts are and why some vendors are being paid for an automated service that could easily be combined with another function and/or company too, so it’s an analysis process that keeps on feeding itself without proper and due planning. All someone needs to hear is that it will save money and those perhaps not high in IT/data area jump all over it as they see cost reduction in their area of focus and yet outside those realms, it will increase cost in other areas and create a new “profit machine” unknown to the person who contracted with the vendor for their purposes.
Again, those without IT experience end up buying in with perhaps not being able to see the entire picture as they are not IT folks. As mentioned in a prior post, this may lead to openings from outside industry such as Microsoft, Google and others to approach the thresholds with their designed and engineered features as they are the coders that make it all happen.
Shrinking Federal Budgets May Be Opening Doors of Opportunity for Microsoft – US CIO Shelving Projects That are Not Working
What is also nice is to see the “Federal IT Dashboard” being used to allow the analysis and red flagging of selected projects. Look for the list to be published for those project to come under review. BD
The Office of Management and Budget plans to review up to 30 "high risk" federal IT projects as the next step in an ongoing process to identify and remediate troubled, big-ticket technology deployments.
Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, in a June 28 conference call, said his office will work with agency CIOs to identify 25 to 30 IT projects across federal government that are deemed high risk and to conduct detailed reviews of those projects. Kundra estimated the total cost over the life of those projects, if allowed to proceed, to be $30 billion.
"In order to justify future funding for these projects, agencies will need to demonstrate that project risks can be reduced to acceptable levels through actions such as setting proper project scope, defining clear deliverables and mission-oriented outcomes, and putting in place a strong governance structure with explicit executive sponsorship," OMB said in a statement. "Projects which do not meet these criteria will not be continued."
On Aug. 23, OMB will release a list of up to 30 projects to be reviewed. Those projects will be required to undergo one of OMB's TechStat accountability sessions and to demonstrate executive sponsorship and improvement plans in order to move ahead. There was no mention of putting a temporary freeze on high-risk projects while they undergo review, as happened during the financial system reviews.
White House To Review High-Risk IT Projects -- Government Technology -- InformationWeek
It's really great that our government is taking a step back and actually LOOKING at whether or not a particular department is doing redundant things that could in turn be wasteful spending. Great article. Really encourages faith in the current administration.
ReplyDelete