“With the primary missions of protecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services, HHS bore the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic. Its component agencies – Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services – live on the front lines of public health.”
“Jose Arrieta is CIO and Chief Data Officer (CDO) for HHS, which employs 83,000 staff and nearly as many contractors. Arrieta, who said this month he plans to leave the agency soon, tells the story of HHS’ IT missions in two chapters. The first is a race for resiliency in the face of massive cyberattacks early in the pandemic. The second is the birth of a COVID-19 data gathering and analytics operation that promises to pave the nation’s way out of the crisis.”
“The CIO-level effort involved additions of data circuits, big jumps in VPN capacity, firewall upgrades, and a transition to 95 percent telework on the day after one of the largest cyber assaults the agency has ever seen.”
“On the CDO level, Arrieta explains in an interview with MeriTalk the intricacies of taking in billions of crucial healthcare data elements from thousands of sources, creating access management systems to ensure privacy and security, and leveraging machine-learning technologies to drive higher-value insights as science races for the cure…” Read the full article here.
Source: CIO Crossroads: Federal IT in the COVID Crisis – HHS Edition – August 27, 2020. MeriTalk.
