From CMS, HRSA, FDA, USDS and HHS to VA and DHA, the 2019 Innovation Award Winners include a good mix of Federal Programs driving innovation and results that are making a difference.
A panel of judges from a cross section of Government, industry leaders and the startup community had a good time evaluating dozens of deserving applications. With a primary focus on innovation and results achieved, the complete list of winners of the 2019 FedHealthIT Innovation awards are included here.
Communications Relational Assurance Database
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
The Communications Relational Assurance Database was developed to record and store scorecard results and produce reports for CMS and Medicare Administrative Contractors’ use. The database was designed to ensure the integrity and security of the data and includes only the access of authorized personnel through unique user ID and passwords, and meeting CMS requirements.
Solor
Department of Veterans Affairs
Solor serves to integrate health care terminology data into a unified language, addressing a key challenge in health care interoperability that currently requires a manual mapping process, which is costly and error-prone. Solor can overcome this issue by transforming and simplifying the representation of clinical data, while also retaining its semantic meaning when transferred in a single, shareable model.
Veterans Signals
Department of Veterans Affairs
Veteran Signals (VSignals) is a continuation of the award-winning VOICE Veteran Experience program and is an effort by the Department of Veterans Affairs to create an enterprise-level Customer Experience (CX) solution for the collection of Veteran feedback on a comprehensive list of VA programs and services for use in improving the Veteran Experience.
Vet360
Department of Veterans Affairs
Vet360 is the connective tissue that enables the sharing of contact information across VA’s many systems. VA customers have control, visibility and ownership of their information, and employees have the up-to-date information they need to personalize interactions and provide excellent customer service. Vet360 will continue to add domains, realize efficiencies, and expand VA’s understanding of its customers.
Check out this fun video celebrating Vet360 and Veterans Signals:
Benefits Integration Platform
Department of Veterans Affairs
The BIP concept supports and enhances existing systems supporting Veterans while simultaneously reducing the technology footprint. A modern, cloud-based platform, based on an open-source technology stack, has been established in the VA’s enterprise cloud environment, and data is being migrated out of the current commercial hosting facility to the BIP platform.
HHS ACCELERATE
Department of Health and Human Services
HHS ACCELERATE uses a combination of emerging technologies to create and extract value from standardized acquisition data to facilitate acquisition planning and contract writing. This enables acquisition savings through analysis of the HHS acquisition data and achieves process improvements, such as reduced award time, and IT investment savings. It automatically populates forms by pulling data from underlying systems.
Beneficiary Claims Data API
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
The Beneficiary Claims Data API builds upon the MyHealthEData initiative supporting industry innovation in unleashing the power of data to enhance efficiency, improve quality and reduce cost. Based on the FHIR Bulk Data Access standard, this API enables Accountable Care Organizations to retrieve Medicare claims data for their assigned or assignable beneficiaries, getting vital information to the right people at the right time.
TBI Portal
Defense Health Agency
The Traumatic Brain Injury Portal provides a consolidated view of TBI patient data to inform clinical decisions and enable research across the Military Health System. Clinicians, researchers, and stakeholders interested in monitoring the short and long-term effects of brain injuries can use the portal to support patient-centered care, monitor outcomes, and obtain data to help program evaluation and research efforts.
Cybersecurity Operations Center
Defense Health Agency
The CyOC unifies key DHA cyber terrain responsibilities into one organization to support, provide, and coordinate cyber activities including Incident Response, Issuance Coordination and Compliance, Red Team, and Boundary Protection. The CyOC provides vulnerability management, security and sustainment oversight of Health IT systems within DHA’s enterprise.
Enterprise Blood Management System
Defense Health Agency
EBMS is composed of two separate products: EBMS-Donor and EBMS-Transfusion. These systems modernized IT blood management by transitioning from a client-server based to web-based enterprise system, improving system response time. EBMS enhances the Armed Services Blood Program capabilities for their Donor Centers and Blood Bank/Transfusion Services through the integration of blood product inventory management, transport, availability, and blood product traceability from collection to disposition.
Grants.gov – Grants.gov Workspace
Department of Health and Human Services
Workspace is the standard way for organizations or individuals to apply for Federal grants in Grants.gov. The Grants.gov Workspace allows a grant team to simultaneously access and edit different forms within an application. The Workspace facilitates real-time collaboration and saves resources by fostering the reuse of existing information. More than 250,000 applicants benefit from this functionality as we continue to align with The President’s Management Agenda (PMA) Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goals, such as CAP Goals 5 & 8.
Light Electronic Action Framework
Veterans Health Administration
LEAF is a low-code solution for digitizing paper-based forms. It empowers non-technical users across VA to automate any multilayered, time-consuming business process through the creation and implementation of workflows and digital forms. The result is streamlined business activities, increased transparency and real-time data and status tracking. Today, LEAF is empowering thousands of VA frontline personnel without technical backgrounds to quickly and securely modernize business processes.
CHAMP
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
The Office of Hearings Case and Document Management System (OH CDMS) provides the ability to have digital document management, execute case functions digitally, and communicate electronically with providers and contractors. The goal of OH CDMS is to increase efficiency of the appeals process to focus on substantive decision-making and to provide transparency to the parties.
CSA 405(d) Task Group
Department of Health and Human Services
The CSA 405(d) Task Group, under the leadership of co-chairs Julie Chua (HHS) and Erik Decker (University of Chicago Medicine), brought together over 150 public and private sector stakeholders to produce and disseminate the Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices: Managing Threats and Protecting Patients (HICP) resource, a targeted set of applicable and voluntary practices that seeks to cost-effectively reduce the cybersecurity risks of Healthcare organizations.
Federally Facilitated Marketplace Cloud Migration
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services migrated the entire Federally-Facilitated Marketplace from on-premise data centers to cloud-hosted environments in under 18 months without interruption to 24/7/365 operations or Healthcare.gov open enrollment. Concurrent with the phased transition of 20+ applications and 80+ environments, the team implemented a set of core shared services to support all applications and migrated ~2 petabytes of data.
Enterprise Software Asset Management Program
Department of Veterans Affairs
The VA developed the Enterprise Software Asset Management (ESAM) program for strategically tracking and managing IT software assets throughout their life cycle. ESAM successfully integrated several heterogeneous software data sources into a single pane-of-glass view. The ESAM program provides capability to analyze agency-wide software license data such as costs, usage, and trends to identify cost saving opportunities and better software investment decision making.
Digital Transformation Center
Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Information & Technology
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) established a VA-wide Digital Transformation Center (DTC) to improve VA’s ability to support Veterans through the use of rapid, incremental improvements in information technology (IT) capabilities, driving a genuine working partnership between the business and IT, utilizing Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and other emerging technologies as transformation enablers.
Safely Dispose of Your Prescription Medicines
National Institutes of Health
To help prevent prescription drug misuse, the NIDA’s safe drug disposal tool guides users through the steps to properly get rid of expired, unwanted, or unused medicines before they become a problem. The webpage leads parents step by step through a process to understand when a medicine should be returned to an authorized collection site, or safely flushed or tossed in the garbage.
Digital Process Automation
National Eye Institutes, National Institutes of Health
The Digital Process Automation program is a quick, Agile delivery process that promotes a strong collaborative and iterative approach to go from design to development to test to production, leveraging the full features and capabilities of a low-code digital process automation tool, and the cost efficiencies and shared services of the NIH Secure Cloud environment.
SDD Agile Playbook
Defense Health Agency
The Solution Delivery Division (SDD) Agile Playbook is a collaborative network for sharing knowledge on Agile development methodologies and practices across the Defense Health Agency. The Solutions Delivery Division(SDD) of DHA has implemented Agile across multiple programs and project teams. The advent of the SDD Agile Playbook helps permeate and sustain these practices to a broader audience that is pursuing the implementation of Agile practices within their own Agency.
Medicare Enrollment & Premium Billing System
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
CMS users were burdened with outdated legacy user interfaces to review and update Beneficiary data. The MEPBS program implemented the innovative Eligibility Enrollment Medicare Online UI which consolidated hundreds of workflow and business process systems into one new modern system. The ELMO system development enabled business owners to realize tangible efficiencies in their mission to support active beneficiaries.
USAMMA Distribution Operations Center Vaccine Support
US Army Medical Materiel Agency
The system enables the cross-organizational stakeholders of the business network to interact and track the shipments of medical products administered to deployed soldiers and their families. IOT temperature sensors were integrated to directly record the in-transit temperature information and to certify the viability of the medical products.
Advanced Provider Screening
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Advanced Provider Screening uses Spring Boot as service container and Apache Nifi as orchestration engine to support scalable data routing, transformation, and system mediation with strong data provenance and auditing capabilities. The highly scalable design is focused on building a data pipeline that would survive changes in data sources, data formats and data delivery protocols.
precisionFDA
Food and Drug Administration
precisionFDA is a secure, cloud-based omics platform for accepting and analyzing large biological datasets. It was built with a goal to advance regulatory science in precision medicine by offering a forum for collaboration in this area of evolving science. This platform is public, open-source, and has over 3,000 members representing NGS instrument manufacturers, NGS-based test providers, standards-making bodies, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, healthcare providers, academic medical centers, research consortia, and government agencies.
HIGLAS
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Healthcare Integrated General Ledger Accounting System (HIGLAS) is the Federal Financial System of Record for all Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Systems (CMS) programs. HIGLAS processes daily average volumes of 4.4 million claims, and accounts for approximately $1.4 trillion in annual payment transactions. HIGLAS modernized the overall technology stack and engineered systems while maintaining complex day-to-day operations at ease.
FDA Data Dashboard
Food and Drug Administration
The FDA created the Data Dashboard to increase transparency and accountability by displaying and allowing the analysis of public FDA data through easy to use, visually accessible, customizable, and understandable graphics. In September 2016 the FDA decided to reconstitute, update, and enhance the existing Data Dashboard, formerly GovDashboard which was launched in 2013. The accepted solution utilizes Qlik Sense BI to graphically display publicly available FDA data.
VEText
Department of Veterans Affairs
To increase access to Healthcare for all Veterans, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) developed VEText, an interactive mobile solution to remind Veterans of upcoming appointments (via text message). The goal was to offer Veterans an easy way to confirm or cancel appointments. VEText has reached over 6.15M Veterans, processed more than 1.76M cancellations, and has helped decrease the overall national no-show rate by nearly 2%.
CAMS-HIGLAS Real-time Interfaces Solution
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
CHRIS allows funds-control across CMS procurement transactions and eliminates manual entry of more than 3,000 procurement transactions every year. CHRIS streamlines the reconciliation process between the two highly complex systems (The Comprehensive Acquisition Management System (CAMS) and the Healthcare Integrated General Ledger Accounting System (HIGLAS). HIGLAS is the system of record for financial management and reporting that tracks every single Medicare claim, financial transaction, grant, and administrative payment.
Lighthouse – VA’s Application Programming Interface(API) Program
Veterans Affairs, Office of Information & Technology
Lighthouse represents a crucial shift allowing VA to deliver applications and services to Veterans at a more rapid pace. Through empowering partners to build innovative solutions through a modern API development experience and standards-based APIs. In the last year VA launched a developer portal, and APIs for benefits, VA facilities, Veteran Verification, and health. Over 200 developers have signed up and 12 are using production data.
Join us for the FedHealthIT Innovation Awards and Networking Event on Tuesday, June 11, 2019 at the National Press Club, “The Place Where News Happens,” and network with more than 300+ senior Federal Health IT executives from Industry and Government.
This event recognizes and honors Federal Health innovation, technology and consulting sector programs nominated and selected by their peers for DRIVING INNOVATION and RESULTS across the Department of Veterans Affairs, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Military Health, the Department of Health and Human Services.
Executive Keynote Panelists
- Patrick Flanders, Chief Information Officer, Defense Health Agency (Confirmed)
- Marcy Jacobs, Executive Director, US Digital Service, VA (Confirmed)
- Jennifer Main, Chief Operating Officer, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (Confirmed)
- Julie Boughn, Director, Data and Systems Group,Center for Medicaid & CHIP Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, (Confirmed)
- Alastair Thomson, Chief Information Officer, National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute, NIH (Confirmed)
- Dominic Cussatt, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Deputy Chief Information Officer, Department of Veterans Affairs (Confirmed)
- Misu Tasmin, Strategy and Operations, US Digital Service, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (Confirmed)
- Bill James, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Development Operations, VA (Confirmed)
- Bobby Saxon, Chief Technology Officer, Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (Confirmed)
- Steven Hubbard, Senior Innovation Architect, Food and Drug Administration (Confirmed)
- John Short, Technology Integration Officer, Electronic Health Records Modernization, Department of Veterans Affairs (Confirmed)
We would like to thank our Emcee, Joe Grace, Jr., Grace and Associates.
EVENT AGENDA
Registration 1:15-2:00 pm. Event Begins at 2:00 pm
- Welcome & Introductions
- Leading for IMPACT in Federal Health IT: Keynote Panel 1
- Innovation in Federal Health IT: Keynote Panel 2
- FedHealthIT Innovation Awards Recognition Ceremony
- Networking Reception to Honor and Celebrate Award Winning Programs
Please note we will have a photographer at this event and will post pictures afterward on social media and our site.
Register for the event here.
