More than 1,000 senior executives and IT professionals from across industry and government gathered January 16th at the North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center in Bethesda Maryland to attend the Armed Forces Communications Electronics Association (AFCEA) Bethesda Chapter’s Health IT Day https://Bethesda.afceachapters.org.
Top on the list of events included keynote presentations and panel discussions from stakeholders at federal agencies such as FDA https://www.fda.gov, CDC https://www.cdc.gov, CMS https://www.cms.gov,, HHS https://www.hhs.gov, NIH https://www.nih.gov, ONC https://www.healthit.gov, Veterans Administration https://www.va.gov, and the Department of Defense https://www.defense.gov.
Keynoter Beth Annie Killoran, Deputy Assistant Secretary for IT and CIO, for HHS https://www.hhs.gov, commented on how health IT and medical science are rapidly advancing. This is occurring since medical researchers are moving forward to address precision medicine, achieving advances and progress in research, and working together to tackle the opioid crisis. Also, new advanced mobile technologies, machine learning, and developments in artificial intelligence are making national and international headlines
Guy Kiyokawa Deputy Director for the Defense Health Agency (DHA) https://health.mil/dha also a keynoter, wants to see industry engaged as much as possible so he suggested that industry reach out to government procurement offices with new ideas on IT.
Although DHA takes care of service members worldwide, there are still gaps taking place in the practice of medicine between the services. As Kiyokawa explained, “A single service can’t fill all the gaps so the services have to work together and we also need to develop a more business approach to managing healthcare.
DHA’s goal is to integrate a system that can deal with both readiness and health issues. The goal is to empower and care for people, but at the same time, optimize operations across the Military Health Service in order to effectively strengthen strategic partnerships and alliances.
In one of the panel discussions on the use of data, Ethan Chen, Acting Director, Division of Data Management Services and Solutions at FDA, Vaishall Popat, Associate Director for Biomedical Informatics, Office of New Drugs at FDA, and COL. John Scott, Data Manager for the Defense Health Agency (DHA), commented on several issues involving the use of data at their specific agencies.
The panelists from FDA noted that when new drugs need to be approved, decisions must be made based on using quality data and then reports are developed to support those decisions. The panelists agreed that presently, the enormous amount of data available now and in the future can be a challenge to analyze and summarize all at one time.
Another breakout session “What the Hack? Hands Off Our Health Data” discussed the federal healthcare threat challenges and how the agencies have an immediate need to protect health data. Therefore, there needs to be an understanding of how to deal with the threat challenges in terms of how agencies can combat hacking on an everyday basis.
Contributors to the conversation on security issues were Barton Day Cybersecurity Architect, Division of Cyber Threat and Security Operations CMS, Servie Medina, Cyber Security Policy Branch Chief for DHA, Kevin Robins, Director Network Security Operations Center, VA, Gary Stevens, Director of Cybersecurity, VA, and Chris Wiaschin, Chief Information Security Officer at HHS