Click the image to view the speeches. Program descriptions are below.
Financial Service Center Financial Technology Service Cloud Initiative
Department of Veterans Affairs
The VA FSC FTS program provides key IT operations, engineering, and technical support for critical FSC financial systems and services serving VA and external customers. In response to VA’s Cloud First Policy mandating IT solutions be evaluated for VA Enterprise Cloud suitability, FSC FTS proactively undertook a massive modernization initiative, helping FSC meet Cloud First Policy obligations and positioning the organization to scale to meet future business demands while reducing cost, increasing security, and leveraging modern technology and mission-focused design. The FSC FTS forward-thinking approach toward organizational transformation drives organic, enterprise-wide solutions, resulting in continuous modernization that builds upon its own successes while aligning to long-term FTS transformation goals.
Annie
Department of Veterans Affairs
Annie is an interactive, automated text messaging system that encourages Veterans to participate in their health care while creating an additional access point for care teams observe patients’ progress. Annie is particularly beneficial for specialized care needs like chronic diseases and mental health conditions. Annie currently offers 161 protocols, 40 protocols are universal, at 50 medical centers across the country. VA care teams and their patients establish personalized care plans based on diagnoses, health goals and outcomes. Annie is changing VA health care. More six thousand VA patients are enrolled in Annie, since it’s pilot in 2016, and more than four thousand of whom enrolled in 2019.
Appeals Modernization “Caseflow”
Department of Veterans Affairs
The VA Appeals Modernization Project was setup to streamline a complicated legacy system. The goal of Caseflow is to build this new solution by leveraging a Human Centered Design approach (HCD) following Agile processes and have Engineering/Testing/Deployment/Monitoring within a DevOps CI/CD platform. Caseflow has implemented a fully integrated DevOps platform. Since the Appeals Modernization Act (AMA) major release in February 2019, Caseflow has helped veterans by: Significantly reduced the adjudication time of appeals; enabled ease of personal interaction with VA attorneys; and increased transparency of the appeal status. Caseflow took a major step in 2019 to continue improving the lives of veterans.
Integrated Financial and Acquisition Management System
Department of Veterans Affairs
The iFAMS transformation was intended to modernize a messaging platform that would integrate with both legacy and emerging electronic health record (EHR) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The result was faster and more reliable software delivery, more immediate responses to features and fixes, and an overall reduction in application downtime. By utilizing an agile, container-based approach, the team delivered iFAMS at a 78% cost savings over Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology. Data integrated from iFAMS will be used to engage in data analytics and intelligent automation for purposes of detecting fraud and providing further financial service efficiency.
FLOW3: Enterprise Prosthetic Limb Workflow Management System
Department of Veterans Affairs
FLOW3 is a system that automates, standardizes, and provides transparency into the limb acquisition process. The Web-based App provides dashboards so all staff can check order status and move the order through each stage, streamlining the process from start to end. It provides a faster process from prescription to purchase order to limb delivery resulting in Rx to PO authorization reduced from 21.3 to 10.3 days (non-VA providers), variability in timeliness reduced 57%, Rx to limb delivery reduced 39-50%; improved communication, patient engagement and continuity of care with more Veterans returning to clinic; greater data transparency and accuracy for: Prosthetics, Veterans with limb loss, Current VA Services and need for new services.
No Wound Left Behind Initiative – TeleWound Care Program
Department of Veterans Affairs
This innovative patient-centric TeleWound Care Program, coupled with a QUERI partnered evaluation initiative, provides access to specialists providing evidence-based care at a time and location which best meets Veterans’ needs, thereby obviating multiple inherent geo-burden associated struggles, while decreasing the likelihood for limb-threatening infections, hospitalizations and even amputations. The program assists consistency in TeleWound care across VHA and supports Department Priorities, allowing Veterans to schedule appointments at locations best meeting their needs. To date, TeleWound Care Program served 1349 unique Veterans, provided 2387 encounters, served 218 unique rural Veterans, provided 664 rural encounters, after implementing 8 facilities across 4 VISNs.
VistA to VA Enterprise Cloud (V2EC) Project
Department of Veterans Affairs
VAEC was established to host, manage, and modernize VA’s IT resources using a Federal Agency-exclusive GovCloud that is certified to the highest security requirements, including VA and DOD. Closure of the data center initiated a proof of concept for migrating VistA to the VAEC to facilitate VA’s eventual migration to a Cerner cloud-hosted EHR. By migrating VistA to the VAEC, VA ‘s leadership fully embraced and executed on the OMB’s Cloud-Smart strategy. Several months of production use and testing of these systems has yielded the following findings: · Enhanced reliability and availability · Automated disaster recovery · Improved data protections, security and auditing · Improved resource utilization
Machine Learning Decision Support to Audit and Impact Prescription Service Connection/Special Authority Decisions
Department of Veterans Affairs
MLDS uses narrow-artificial intelligence to model clinicians’ behavior when applying prescription benefit decisions, and identify unusual events for review, and further analysis. Automated decisions can correct abnormal post hoc; however, our aim is to prevent abnormal events from occurring by instantiating a cloud-based recommender system to support clinicians within the ordering process. The fully automated sites demonstrated tripled revenue generated on fewer interventions. In the as-is state, the program can return at a minimum $22,500 per dollar spent, returning at least $18M annually to medical centers funding for medical care. With the cloud infrastructure and including indirect administrative and clinical workload revenue and cost avoidance would exceed $50M annually.
Veterans Health Administration 3D Printing Network
Department of Veterans Affairs
The VHA 3D Printing Network aims to extend the availability of 3D printing technologies to every VAMC in the country. The VHA 3DP network is acting as a force multiplier for 3D printing in health care by: Connecting innovators of various levels and expertise across the VA to share their work in 3D printing, opportunities for collaboration, best practices, health, safety, and quality standards, and promote knowledge and training opportunities; Exploring bioprinting, the creation of 3D printed structures that can support living cells. The VHA 3D Printing Network facilitates advancements in surgery, orthotics and prosthetics, assistive technology, and treatment of chronic illnesses.
Diffusion Marketplace
Department of Veterans Affairs
For VHA employees, the Marketplace provides easy access to a range of innovations, tutorials, ratings, and the practice creators. Practices found on the Marketplace are proven, replicable, and measurable in terms of their results. The Marketplace is an innovative, consumer-focused technology tool. The Marketplace was to launch with information on 53 high-impact promising practices. VHA employees will be able to easily access practice information and follow the journey as the Marketplace collects more practices. The anticipated will results include having an active and engaging forum where employees can share, discover, and implement promising practices that ultimately, change and save Veterans lives.
Solor
Department of Veterans Affairs
Solor enables developers to collaborate and convert any user-supplied terminologies and standards such as LOINC for laboratory data, SNOMED CT for symptoms data, and RxNorm for pharmaceutical data into a single, shareable model. Solor can also be used as part of a quality assurance process to validate exported content across the continuum of care. This year, FDA’s Systemic Harmonization & Interoperability Enhancement for Lab Data (SHIELD) working group has partnered with VA to demonstrate how Solor can be used as a platform to build an interoperable network of health systems for laboratory in vitro diagnostic testing, starting with six sites across the nation, to include Intermountain Healthcare.
VA Informatics and Computing Infrastructure (VINCI)
Department of Veterans Affairs
To enable clinicians and researchers to derive value from massive datasets to improve health outcomes for Veterans, the VA Informatics and Computing Infrastructure (VINCI) program provides a secure, centralized platform using leading-edge analytics tools and techniques to support health services research, epidemiology, decision support, and business intelligence capabilities that clinicians and researchers leverage. To support analytics efficiency the VA built a robust analytic environment to perform data-intensive, high-performance computing using pioneering technologies including Hadoop, natural language processing (NLP), IBM Machine Learning, and Tensor Flow to enhance research capabilities. The VA’s robust VINCI environment can support over 10,000 users running complex analytics against 4.3PB of data, which grows by nearly 10TB annually.
VA.gov Health Product Line
Department of Veterans Affairs
VA applied human-centered design to apply feedback from 5,000 Veteran users to deliver a new VA.gov that allowed Veterans to access and manage their personalized VA benefits in one place. In 2019, VA started work to improve the VA Medical Center websites to ship a user-first digital experience for Veterans, family members, and caregivers that provides solutions to key touch points in the end-to-end VA health care journey. Focusing on customer experience paid off; in addition to a 25% increase in customer satisfaction for the newly designed pages on va.gov, there was an increase in benefit applications across the board.
Health Records API
Department of Veterans Affairs
The VA launched the Lighthouse API program creating a modern development experience for internal and external developers to build innovative solutions for the Veteran, their caregivers, and their advocates. The VA Health Records API provides up to 10 years of transformed VA health data that is compliant with the Argonaut profile and FHIR DSTU2 standards. The VA Health Records API successfully created the health consumer-direct data exchange (CDDE) empowering Veterans to securely connect their health information with their explicit consent to externally-developed technology solutions across mobile platforms. Veteran’s are empowered as digital health data consumers to shape and influence health technology solutions based on their needs in the evolving health consumer technology ecosystem.
See the video and read about the winners from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services here.
See the video and read about the winners from the Defense Health Agency here.
See the video and read about the winners from the Department of Health and Human Services here.
