Government Bits

Tracking how technology is transforming interaction between governments and citizens.

The following post originally appeared in the Adobe Standards blog.

It’s finally Spring, which means warm weather (I hope), longer days, and most importantly, the Adobe Civilian Government Road Show and MAX!

One of the best parts of my job is being able to get out and meet with our customers to help them understand and use our products more effectively. We’re taking our demos on the road in late April/early May for three Adobe Digital Government Forums:

• Baltimore, April 25
• Atlanta, April 30
• Denver, May 2

More details on the venues, registration, etc. will be coming soon. In the interim, have you registered for Adobe MAX yet? MAX will be held May 4-8 in Los Angeles, CA. It is the premiere event for designers, developers, and other content creators and creative professionals to learn about our digital media tools. There are always tons of hands-on sessions as well as government-specific topics and gatherings, so it’s a great opportunity to learn more about our products and how they can benefit your agency. We’ll have several members of our government team onsite at the event as well.

Also, if you’re not able to get out to some of these events, let the events come to you; our webinar series features a variety of topics for technical and executive audiences. 

Hope to see you soon!

*This article originally appeared in the Healthcare IT Connect online magazine

Change on the horizon

The current transformation of the healthcare IT industry has been referred by industry experts as “a period of extreme standardization.”  The immediate need for adopting electronic health records to make the Meaningful Use benchmark of the US government is being traversed by pharmacies, clinics, medical practitioners, payers, and healthcare providers.

Fortunately for all involved there is one key ally in the field, blazing the trail ahead of the 2014 PPACA deadline.  Adobe is pioneering solutions, including LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 3, that are utilized more and more by healthcare professionals to ramp up and leverage staggering amounts of digital data capture.

Adobe’s Aaron Bird recently shared the company’s experience helping healthcare providers prevent fraud, waste, and abuse, using the enterprise-class suite of Adobe products.

Adobe’s current focus:

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The adoption of cloud computing has steadily become one of the most significant enablers of innovation in recent years. From providing mobile access to remotely synchronized folders, to delivering on-demand streams of new video releases, the cloud has transformed how consumers interact with their devices in countless ways (often quietly behind the scenes).

Further blurring the line between private and public sector innovation, government agencies are increasingly turning to the cloud for similar technical advantages that translate directly into business value for their enterprises as well.

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In fact, IDC predicts that public IT cloud services will see gains at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26.4 percent—five times that of the IT industry overall between 2012 and 2016. But despite promises of significant gains in agility, scalability, and reliability, most public sector executives commit to extensively crunching the numbers on ROI and addressing security concerns (at both agency and content levels) before taking the plunge into even the most popular cloud service models, including:

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As more parts of our lives “go digital”, the collection of data related to our transactions, interests, and other preferences continues to grow exponentially.

Many commercial enterprises have demonstrated that the ability to manage and even monetize such data provides a powerful competitive advantage. In fact, it’s that principle of Digital Marketing which allows for the delivery of unique personalized experiences for consumers online.  Our health data is no exception.

The health care industry has been criticized for being a laggard when it comes to tapping the wealth of information that’s often locked away in terabytes of stored data, both structured and unstructured, compounding with every insurance claim or provider interaction.  That’s changing, however, as innovative solutions that have modernized industries like travel, financial services, and others are gradually being leveraged throughout the healthcare ecosystem.
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Recently, at the Adobe-sponsored State Healthcare IT Connect Summit, I met with executives from state and federal agencies as well as leaders of private sector health organizations to explore the key role of IT in identifying trends, cutting costs, and saving lives.

Three recurring use cases for transforming this accumulating data into actionable knowledge emerged during our meetings:

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Dissecting the Decision

Yesterday, as the Supreme Court upheld the vast majority of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a couple caveats were highlighted in the court’s ruling. Regarding the mandate, most people understand the law is economically sustainable only if all citizens participate. The court established that the penalty to be paid by those citizens who refuse to acquire health insurance essentially amounts to a “tax.” Therefore, congress was within its constitutional rights to include such a mandate/tax/penalty in the law.  Although to some it may seem the Supreme Court’s ruling was based partly on semantics, ACA proponents declare it a victory since everyone was previously burdened with the shared costs of caring for the uninsured by way of increasing hospital charges and insurance premiums.

The court also ruled that expansion of Medicaid to offer more citizens health coverage may proceed, but without the ACA stipulation that US states that don’t comply would be denied matching federal funding for their original Medicaid programs. So states may now choose whether to participate in the federally-funded expansion.  Note:  the ACA already included a similar provision (Section 1332: Waiver for State Innovation) that allows for states to opt out so long as they offer citizens the same level of quality care at a cost that is equal to lesser than the ACA, but not until 2017.

Looking Ahead

As focus shifts from the law’s credibility to its timely implementation, Health IT will play a prominent role in the delivery of affordable care to more than 30 million new customers. Many provisions of the ACA rely heavily on IT to raise awareness, determine eligibility, manage payments, improve decision-making, measure quality, and more.
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I recently moderated a two-day conference on Government Health IT in Washington DC where Janet Marchibroda, Health IT Chair at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), spoke on the topic.

To anyone passionate about applying technology to drive transformative change and improve the way we live, this week is shaping up to be a tough one to beat in the public sector. It’s been like receiving a gift-wrapped box of energy, laser focused on government innovation and modernization.

Yesterday, President Obama issued a memorandum to the heads of all US executive departments and agencies calling on them to leverage “technological advances to fundamentally change how they serve their customers.”  

The memo, entitled "Building a 21st Century Digital Government," goes on to explain:

“For far too long, the American people have been forced to navigate a labyrinth of information across different Government programs in order to find the services they need. In addition, at a time when Americans increasingly pay bills and buy tickets on mobile devices, Government services often are not optimized for smartphones or tablets, assuming the services are even available online.”

As a follow-up to Executive Order 13571 (Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service) which he signed in April 2011, the president’s memo also announced the release of a new Government-wide strategy developed to accomplish the monumental goal of enabling “more efficient and coordinated digital service delivery” across all agencies.

Simultaneously, yesterday in New York City at TechCrunch Disrupt 2012, Steven Van Roekel (US Chief Information Officer) and Todd Park (US Chief Technology Officer), launched this landmark initiative to thousands of attendees excited to learn the details.

The comprehensive accompanying strategy, entitled “"Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People", includes a 12-month road map that emphasizes three priority actions:

•  Encouraging agencies to deliver information in new ways that fully utilize the power and potential of mobile and web-based technologies
•  Ensuring the safe and secure delivery and use of digital services to protect information and privacy
•  Requiring all agencies to establish central online resources for outside developers, and to adopt new standards for making applicable Government information open and machine-readable by default

In today’s interconnected global economy, such leadership will likely provide a blueprint for similar international efforts as government enterprises worldwide mobilize to optimize efficiency and offer citizens digital experiences on par with those offered by their private sector counterparts.

To that end, we recently hosted the first annual Adobe Government Assembly (AGA) for Canada. The recent creation of Shared Services Canada, a new agency dedicated to optimizing service delivery, has brought new attention to efforts there to "improve the efficiency of IT services across the Canadian federal government and ensure value for taxpayers' dollars."

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Adobe Government Assembly (AGA) is our premier corporate event to demonstrate commitment to the US Public Sector community, announce product launches/pipeline, and highlight collaborative successes with our partners across the country in federal, state, and local markets.

This year, with speakers, panelists, and customers representing almost every segment of the US Public Sector, the 2012 AGA in Washington DC proved to be a dynamic forum for exploring trends that are clearly driving the federal government’s innovative technology agenda, including ‘cloud-first’ policies, Analytics for Measuring Agency Performance, data center consolidation initiatives, and Mobile Government.

AGA session tracks were designed around the following three pillars of relevant challenges that government agencies face day-to-day as well: engaging communities through new technologies, achieving efficiencies during a time of significant budget constraints, and the threat paradigm of data security.

For example, I spoke on a popular panel that delved into the topic of improving agency efficiencies by automating mission-critical business processes.  John Montel, a co-panelist from the US Department of the Interior, detailed how DOI recently implemented Adobe solutions to modernize ways citizens interact with his agency.

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Combining several of my favorite topics, including healthcare and technology, the 2012 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition continued its streak of record-breaking attendance with a final count of just over 37,000 like-minded attendees last month in Las Vegas.

Demonstrated even today, as the US Supreme Court begins to hear arguments on the Affordable Care Act, this past year has brought a relentless pace of change throughout the healthcare ecosystem. However, since most stakeholders agree that Health IT can save lives, improve the experience of care, and reduce costs, HIMSS provided a welcomed opportunity for stakeholders from all segments to come together, learn and share. But then they took it a step further by indulging specific interests within those broad topics.

For example, is Social your thing?  “There’s a pavilion for that.”

Interested in business trends and policy updates within the federal government? “Here’s your workshop.”

Responsible for improving clinical outcomes and cost-effectiveness?  “Check out the Intelligent Hospital Pavilion”

Driving efficiency through medical device connectivity? “The Interoperability Showcase is for you.”

I could go on, but let’s just say this was one of those weeks that I particularly loved my job. It was simply MU-tiful (sorry, -inside joke for my fellow health IT geeks).

And it was especially rewarding to highlight the significant role Adobe technologies played in many of the featured products and solutions at the world’s largest Health IT conference.

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Healthcare agencies, payers, providers, and partners worldwide trust Adobe to securely drive customer engagement, optimize workflow efficiencies, and measure overall effectiveness.  And HIMSS is always a great place for us to demonstrate our commitment to them, and to just say thank you.

Drop us a line anytime on Twitter @AdobeGov and @AdobeCEM.

South By Southwest Interactive (SXSW) began nearly 20 years ago as an annual music festival in Austin, Texas. The event has since evolved into an incubator for all things digital, now featuring five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new web technologies, video advancements and startup ideas the “interactive” community has to offer.

From hands-on training to a big-picture analysis of the future, SXSW has become the place for thousands of attendees to experience a preview of what is unfolding throughout the world of technology. In fact, Twitter and Foursquare both gained initial traction at SXSW in years past.

As public sector enterprises aggressively strive to offer citizens and inter-agency customers a digital experience that rivals that of their private sector counterparts, events like SXSW are becoming more relevant to them as well.

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We recently hosted the daylong Adobe Creative Camp onsite at SXSW 2012 to delve into a long list of trending hot topics from web-to-mobile development, to providing sneak peeks at the next generation of Adobe creative solutions.

If you were unable to join us, check out the following links for a sample of what you missed…