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Chopra touts administration's innovation agenda for health care

Aneesh Chopra, the federal chief technology officer, said he believes the Obama administration's innovation agenda coupled with health care reform legislation that became law in 2010 paves the way for some remarkable changes in health care technology over the next few years.

Speaking June 2 at an event hosted by Bisnow and sponsored by Accenture, Chopra said the government has the power to set the market conditions that can shape the creative power of the private sector.

By “set market conditions,” Chopra said he meant things such as incentive payments to health care providers that can demonstrate “meaningful use” of electronic health record technologies. By making the policy decision that the EHR could be composed of multiple systems working together and not be limited to comprehensive solutions from single vendors, there are “not a half-dozen vendors, but 500” whose products can be useful, he added.

Related stories:

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Clinton launches global maternal health program via mobile devices

The Obama administration is using a number of strategies to inspire the private sector to create new technologies and solutions, Chopra said. “We’ve shifted the default setting from top-down change models to the notion of bottom-up change,” he said.

Another opportunity for companies in health care technology comes from the changes in payment structure that the health care reform law will bring as it goes into effect over the next several years, Chopra said.

“Today, [doctors] get paid for volume,” he said. “If you see a patient, you get paid. If you avoid the need to see a physician or go to the hospital, there’s a disincentive for that.”

Under such a structure, technology to aid physician scheduling and billing finds a robust market, he said. “The maturity of the IT market for products that actually help you treat patients better is weak.”

But under the new approach on the horizon, volume will be less important while quality of care and avoiding physician visits when a phone call or secure e-mail will suffice will become more prominent measures, Chopra said.

However, Alan Merten, president of George Mason University and another member of the panel discussion, took issue with Chopra’s rosy outlook.

“I can’t be optimistic about what you’re saying,” Merten said. “If you look at all the places technology has made a difference, health is far behind. After all these years of screwing up – that’s the technical term – why are you going to do it right now?”

Chopra contended that the bottom-up approach, drawing on the creativity and insight of thousands of technology professionals and other innovators, would be more likely to lead to real advances than the top-down models of the past.

About the Author

Technology journalist Michael Hardy is a former FCW editor.

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Reader comments

Fri, Jun 3, 2011 Dave K

"Chopra said the government has the power to set the market conditions that can shape the creative power of the private sector." Government forays into the market always result in changes in the private sector... as the private sector creatively seeks to ensure profits in spite of the government. Better to keep government OUT of the market, thus letting market creativity be used to figure out how to serve more customers, and thereby profit!

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Blog archive

Yahoo's telework clampdown: Why it happened

Marissa Mayer

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. (Wikimedia Commons)

How did Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer come to the decision to ban telework in the company? Slacking employees were betrayed by the very technology on which they depended.

According to media reports, such as this one by Nicholas Carlson at businessinsider.com, Mayer analyzed logs for Yahoo's virtual private network, which showed when employees were logging into the company's systems to do work. What she found was that they were not doing it often enough.

Telework advocates blasted the move, but Mayer's decision to require employees to come to the office was met with widespread internal approval -- at least according to one unnamed source in Carlson's story. "There isn't massive uprising. The truth is, they've all been [angry] that people haven't been working," the source said.

But is it that simple? According to Kara Swisher, writing at allthingsd.com, the reaction to Mayer's directive has "been mixed but heated, essentially pitting employees against each other in an awkward way. But the reaction from outside the company has been decidedly negative."

What do you observe at your workplace? Are teleworking feds performing diligently, or are they taking advantage of the opportunities to loaf?

Posted by Michael Hardy on Mar 08, 2013 at 12:10 PM

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Reader comments

Tue, Mar 12, 2013 Jermain Gordon Maryland

Telework fullfills a need and the entire company should not have been punished for the laziness of some employees. I think the employees all should have been warned and or required to reduce their telework hours and start coming in to work.

Mon, Mar 11, 2013

We had an informal policy (mid-size company) and it was abused by EVERYONE! Now we have a telecommuting policy that says that there is NO telecommuting. In Ca., we also have Worker' Comp issues. Exempt employees are allowed, at their supervisor's discretion to let the EE work on a specifc project at home, for example, 1 day, if they have a deadline coming up.

Mon, Mar 11, 2013 Federal Employee 305

If telework is not managed properly by Management, then failure is inevitable. I am a frequent telework and tend to have an increase in productivity when teleworking. I would not want to do 5 days a week. I keep my telework to about 1 day a week. I enjoy the ineraction with my fellow co-workers and you just don't get that face time when teleworking.

Mon, Mar 11, 2013 Just say'n Atlanta, GA

I think managers are worried about their jobs and control over staff. Being able to touch the top of someone's head over an 8-9 hour period does not equate to 8-9 hours of productivity. And, just because someone is not logged into the server does not mean they aren't working. They are probably trying not to use up bandwidth that others can use for tasks that don't call for them to be online. Measure staff by what they produce whether it is a product or a service. If an employee does not produce while at work, why would you allow them to work at home in the first place? The others are probably giving you more productivity than if they have to take out the time for dressing, commuting, etc. Marissa sort of threw out the baby with the bath water (with the slap of building her own nursery needs 1st--day care for all would take the sting out of the non-telework too). Not only were excellent telework employees punished, but now the company's infrastructure costs will sky rocket and all of the employees just got an increase in the cost of having their job that they had never had before. Doesn't sound too well thought out to me.

Mon, Mar 11, 2013

Does work require you to be logged into the VPN? I used to telework full time and the majority of my work was done off-line, I only connected to the VPN to upload completed work, check email etc. The previous commentor is correct, this is a Management problem, NOT a telework problem.

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Federal Government Jobs in Cuba

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Jobtitle Job Location Public Department Posted Deadline
Nurse Consultant Guantanamo Bay, Cuba Gov Navy 07/26/15 08/05/15
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Teacher Cuba Pub Defense 04/09/14 07/31/15

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New metrics to help agencies determine value of social media

Justin Herman, lead for social media, Center for Excellence in Digital Government, GSA

Jason Miller | April 17, 2015 4:43 pm

Many agencies have jumped into the social media pool of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and many others without fully understanding why they’re doing it.

The General Services Administration is trying to help answer the question of whether agencies receive value from using social media.

GSA led a 12-member interagency working group, including NASA and the departments of Defense and State, to create a set of metrics specifically aimed at defining the value of social media for federal agencies.

Justin Herman, the lead for social media in GSA’s Center for Excellence in Digital Government, said Tuesday the way private sector companies measure the impact of social media doesn’t work for federal agencies.

Justin Herman, social media lead, Center for Excellence in Digital Government, GSA
“What we wanted to do is address how we can better measure, analyze, and transparently report the strategic outcomes and the impact of social media and social data in government,” Herman said during an event at GSA in Washington as part of Social Media Week. “The way we broke it up was we, of course, defined the fact that the government can and should, to varying degrees depending on what agency you are, be sharing, listening or engaging. What this breaks down is how to take any activity in social media, how to freely monitor it, record it, what those numbers mean and how to apply it to your strategic program.”

The metrics are broken down into 10 areas across seven categories:

  • Breadth – Subcategories include community size and community growth
  • Depth – Subcategories include conversions and viewing
  • Direct engagement – Subcategories include engagement volume and engagement responsiveness.
  • Loyalty – Subcategories include return community
  • Customer experience – Subcategories include sentiment, indicators and survey feedback.
  • Campaigns – No subcategories
  • Strategic outcomes – No subcategories
  • Advertisement

“This is not set in stone because it can’t be,” Herman said. “We recognize the fact in order to have credible social media performance metrics, it’s going to change once a week, once a month. It has to be a living, breathing document. That’s why we released it and asked the public to help keep it updated.”

In addition to the metrics, GSA released an API (application programming interface) that lets users create tools to bring together government social media feeds in one place. GSA created a social media registry and now citizens can customize the feeds they receive.

Herman said they could focus on specific key words, topical areas or agencies and receive all the social media feeds on those subjects.

“We have the social media registry. It’s up there, it’s live. It has over 2,000 accounts in it and we still are adding more. It’s an open source tool, by the way,” he said. “While we have just federal agencies in it, this is something that can spread to state and local governments too. It’s the API we want people to use. That’s the data stream that you can customize and use to link together new tools and create new tools.”

Hackathon to create tools

Herman said GSA wants small businesses, entrepreneurs and other innovators to use the API to create apps or tools for people to take advantage of the government data.

In fact, Wednesday during Social Media week, GSA is holding a hackathon to spur the development of tools using the API.

“It’s of a lot of people’s opinion, APIs should be attached to all of these sites because this is stuff the public already owns,” Herman said. “APIs are a great way to open up and unlock that data so they can provide those services, so they can fully use it because if not, as we know, sometimes technology can raise barriers and make things more difficult, especially if you have to hunt things down. What APIs will do is jell everything together so you can go to one point of entry but then access everything you want, and have full keys to the kingdom.”

Both of these efforts are part of the White House’s Digital Government Strategy, released in May 2012. The Office of Management and Budget soon will release a new “governmentwide open data, content and Web API policy and identify standards and best practices for improved interoperability.”

Under the strategy, the social media metrics were due by August 2012, and the Web API policy was due in November.

Agencies slowly are realizing the platform isn’t as important as the data. A report by the Partnership for Public Service and Booz Allen Hamilton in January highlighted successful social media use cases and nearly all of them were focused on the data more than how the public consumed the information.

Finding meaningful metrics

Herman said APIs and social media metrics will improve the management of data.

“We show how to, in Google Analytics, to do conversations, place a value on it and benchmark customer response times,” he said. “We wanted to find and go through all the freely available tools that are open and accessible to any program manager in government, like Twitter’s own analytic system or Facebook Insights and stitch together and cherry pick what are those metrics that help tell the story. That’s part of what the recommendations do is, you take these simple numbers and it shows you how to match it with strategic goals. That’s how we approached it. We wanted it to be free, easily measurable, easy to analyze to set that new baseline for where agencies are, who might just be reporting their number of followers at their metrics currently.”

Nearly every agency is struggling with how make social media meaningful and measure the impact it has on helping the agency meets its mission. The National Institutes of Health released a request for quote Feb. 11 asking a small business to develop two sets of metrics for the National Library of Medicine to measure its social media impact.

Bids are due Feb. 26 and should address both consumer usage and health professional and biomedical usage of NLM data through social media outlets.

The National Archives and Records Administration is focusing on user adoption and participation.

NARA is using crowdsourcing to address several mission areas, including tagging of photos and transcribing documents.

Crowdsourcing at NARA

Pamela Wright, NARA’s chief innovation officer, said a lot of the agency’s forays into social media are on a small scale, and if there is success they expand it.

For example, she said, NARA set up a pilot using Drupal to see if volunteers would transcribe handwritten documents. NARA started off with 1,000 pages, and within two weeks, it was done.

Wright said that success is leading to a greater effort to have people help with transcribing thousands of pages of documents.

“What I think we will see this year in 2013 is an intersection of social, data and mobile,” said Sheila Campbell, GSA’s director of the Center for Excellence in Digital Government. “Agencies aren’t using social media just for the sake of using social media. So many of us are at organizations where we hear ‘Hey, I need a Facebook page, or we need to set up a YouTube account.’ But some agencies have gone way beyond the very initial phases of developing a social media presence, and they are flipping the equation and saying ‘What are the problems we are trying to solve and how do we use these technologies to drive results?'”

OMB unveils ambitious digital mobile strategy

White House to mandate machine readable, open data

New era of social media pushes agencies toward data away from platforms


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Navy to cut 745 civilian jobs

Cory Bennett
Cory Bennett

As part of its ongoing budget tightening, the Navy will eliminate hundreds of civilian jobs across the globe in the coming months.

In total, 745 positions stand to be cut, although how many people actually lose their jobs remains to be seen. The Navy may offer some employees buyout packages or early retirement options. Others could be moved to vacant positions not on the chopping block.

Still, over the next seven months, naval bases in seven of the Navy’s 12 regions, 20 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Italy, Greece and Cuba will have positions eliminated.

"This action is not taken lightly, but is part of a conscious, risk-based approach to future shore capabilities that are aligned with the Navy Mission," Vice Adm. William French, commander of the Navy Installations Command, said in the release. "I am committed to ensuring that we do all we can to assist those people directly impacted by this action by providing them access to all tools available under reduction in force rules and assisting them with finding future employment."

While installation services might take a “marginal” hit from the cuts, the Navy said it did not expect the cuts to compromise each command’s core mission — serving the fleet, service members and their families.

Because of the across-the-board cuts known as the sequester, the military services have been dealing with a $4 billion reduction in operations and maintenance funds for the current fiscal year. If the sequester cuts continue into the 2014 budget, the Navy could be burdened with a $14 billion funding shortfall, according to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert’s House testimony in April.

Stars and Stripes reported only three positions will be eliminated from Europe, Africa and Southwest Asia. And of those three positions, only one is currently filled.

“We’re going to try to manage that in a manner that will have the best effect on staff,” Lt. Cmdr. Robert Johnson, with Navy Region Europe, Africa, Southwest Asia, told the publication.

-In this Story-

Agencies & Departments, Defense Department, Navy, Military, Jonathan Greenert

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Tiger Woods Has Played an Abbreviated Schedule Thus Far in 2014

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Tiger Woods Has Played an Abbreviated Schedule Thus Far in 2014
Uncredited/Associated Press
Tiger Woods will not play again until the Honda Classic at the end of February.

Tiger sightings on the PGA Tour have become a rarity thus far this season. Woods announced on his website that he would skip the WGC-Accenture Match Play and not play again until the Honda Classic, held near his home at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens, FL.

The world No. 1 was quoted on his personal website:

The Honda Classic is close to my home, and I want to support it whenever I can. We have a learning center at the Murray Middle School in Stuart, FL and this event does so much to help the community, including the efforts of the Nicklaus Children’s Healthcare Foundation.

The 2013-14 PGA Season is 25 percent complete and Woods has played in one official event this year. As the defending champion in the Farmers Insurance Open, he failed to impress critics and golf fans alike.

Woods has won the Farmers Insurance Open seven times in his career and he also won the 2008 U.S. Open, when it was held at Torrey Pines.

His first two rounds of 72-71 at the 2014 Famers Insurance Open left him at one-under par and inside the 36-hole cut line. A very untidy 79 in the third-round, however, included a stretch of two double-bogeys and five consecutive bogeys. He chipped in for par at No. 17 and made a long putt at the last hole to avoid posting 80 or higher.

He fell outside the top-70 and missed the 54-hole cut for the first time in his career. He finished T-80, next to last in the field.

Uncredited/Associated Press
Woods consistently missed fairways and found trouble in Dubai.

Woods next played in the Omega Dubai Desert Classic on the European Tour and struggled to find fairways with his driver. He only posted one round in the 60’s in Dubai and finished T-41.

Golf fans will not see Woods play competitively again until February 27-March 2 in the Honda Classic.

In deciding to skip the WGC-Accenture Match Play, Woods said:

I had planned to take that week off and travel with Lindsey (Vonn) to Sochi, but unfortunately that won’t happen. Instead I will stay home and prepare for the Florida tournaments.

Woods has never been a fan of the Dove Mountain Golf Course, site of the WGC-Accenture Match Play since 2009. He did win the tournament in 2008, before it moved to Dove Mountain.

He was bounced in the first-round of the match play last year by Charles Howell III.

The Honda Classic struggled to draw quality fields throughout its history and has been hosted by seven different golf courses in Florida since 1972. The tournament has attracted much stronger fields since officials moved the event to PGA National in 2007.

It also didn’t hurt that Woods moved to south Florida from Orlando and PGA National is a short drive from his home on Jupiter Island.

Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press
Woods won the 2013 WGC-Cadillac at Doral.

Woods joins Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy in the field in the 2014 Honda Classic and it will host the strongest field thus far in the 2013-14 season.

Woods also announced that he would play in the WGC-Cadillac at newly renovated Trump Doral and the Arnold Palmer Invitational, both of which he will be the defending champion.

Woods said:

I am also excited about spending time with Arnold and defending my title at his tournament and the WGC-Cadillac. I am looking forward to seeing what they’ve done at Doral.

With the four tournaments of the FedEx Cup playoffs at the end of the season, golf does not get serious for the top players until the Florida swing and the run up to the Masters.

At 38 years of age Woods needs to save energy and his legs for the big events that come later in the schedule from the U.S. Open in June through the FedEx Cup playoffs in September.

Woods is still ranked No. 1 on the Official World Golf Rankings, but he is currently No. 207 on the FedEx Cup standings.

Woods’ performance in the Honda Classic, WGC-Cadillac and the Arnold Palmer Invitational will provide a good barometer of the status of his game heading to Augusta.

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In the hours following the Supreme Court’s ruling on “safety buffer zones” around abortion clinics, few mainstream media outlets called attention to the violence that necessitated them – but social media was awash with personal stories which defied their silence.

Hashtags like #ProtectTheZone, #ClinicViolenceIsReal, #NotCounseling, #SCOTUSFail, #clinicthreats, and #antichoiceterrorists all appeared in thousands of tweets from firsthand victims of clinic violence following the SCOTUS decision Thursdsay. Mainstream media, however, did not engage in dialogue about the terror, violence, and harassment which make buffer zones so important.

The Rachel Maddow Show was one of the only prominent cable media programs to immediately weigh in on the reason safety buffer zones came to be. “Let this paint a picture for you,” Maddow opened. She went on to review the murders of doctors in Pensacola and an escort in Pensacola, as well as the murders of two young women in Brookline, Mass. clinics. She recounted the murders of 38-year-old Lee Ann Nichols, and 25-year-old, Shannon Lowney. Both women were clinic receptionists in Brookline, Mass. John C. Salvi killed Lowney and Nichols, and was captured a day later in Norfolk, Va, where he shot up a third reproductive health clinic.

Her guest, Marty Walz, President of the Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts, also weighed in on the Supreme Court decision. “They didn’t do anything about their own buffer zone law, so apparently they think they have one set of rules, and women seeking healthcare should be  subjected to a different set of rules,” he said. He later revealed that PPFA lawyers are reviewing the Supreme Court’s decision, and they plan to frame a new buffer zone law that complies with the ruling.

Media Resources: Twitter;, 6/26/14; Open Jurist, 2/20/98; Feminist Newswire, 6/26/14

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