Government Bits

Tracking how technology is transforming interaction between governments and citizens.

Adobe recently hosted its healthcare technology summit, “Federal Healthcare Solutions: Empowering the Patient, Payer, and Provider”, in Pentagon City, Virginia to stimulate dialogue among major federal healthcare stakeholders. The goal of the conference was to highlight ways that government agencies are leveraging Health IT to accomplish their missions and streamline complex processes through innovation.

Our keynote speaker, Dr. Peter Levin, CTO at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, set the tone for the event by sharing details of his inspiring vision to improve care for our nation’s heroes with the implementation of an open standards-based architecture for health data.

Referencing the significant role of customer experience management, Dr. Levin called for “a new model of engagement” as more users expect to securely interact with their health data through multiple diverse channels.

In the tradition of AGA 2010 (Adobe’s Government Assembly), our healthcare summit also provided everyone an opportunity to delve into relevant issues with the program speakers, including the need to balance the scope of policy with recent advances in technology.

Later, fellow panelists Jenna Noble, Deputy Program Manager for Clinical Support at Defense Health Services Systems (DHSS), and Dave Walsh, Chief Executive Officer at eServices Group, joined me for an interactive roundtable forum. Attendees were engaged as they introduced a wide range of topics including Meaningful Use interpretations as well as leveraging Health Information Exchanges and the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) for efficient claims processing.

Interestingly, one of the hot topics that emerged was the definition and implementation of standards to facilitate the seamless exchange of health data among public payers.

On behalf of Adobe, I’d like to extend a special thanks to all those who were able to attend and participate.

We recently sponsored a Section 508 accessibility event at the U.S. Access Board Auditorium in Washington, D.C. The late October event included discussion on the changing standards, policy, and compliance landscape.

We were honored to have talks by the following special guests:

• Kareem Dale, Associate Director, White House Office of Public Engagement, Special Assistant to the President for Disability Policy
• Terry Weaver, Director of IT Accessibility, General Services Administration
• David Capozzi, Executive Director, U.S. Access Board

The morning also featured a presentation from Adobe and other government leaders on best technology practices for achieving accessibility.

Please check out the following video for an overview of the event, including thoughts from several of the speakers.

If you are responsible in any way for sharing information, whether within government or to the public, appropriately classifying information is always a challenge. There’s a full spectrum of possibilities between full, open disclosure and compartmentalized “need to know”. Especially post 9/11, most US agencies have worked hard to establish guidelines and best practices to allow access to the right information to the right people at the right time. To that end, many agencies have created what in the private sector would be called, proprietary classification schemes. Like any proprietary approach, it works very well within a certain scope, but, it breaks down quickly when confronted with a similar, but, alternative approach. The consequences of such a breakdown can vary from something as simple as an embarrassing situation to a life-threatening scenario.

So, as of November 11th, an Executive Order was signed named “Controlled Unclassified Information” (CUI) that is focused on solving this dilemma across the entire federal government. Assigned by the President, NARA will act as the Executive Agent for this Order, driving a process intended to rationalize the various approaches already in place across the agencies.

Standardization, what a good thing! Not only does this Executive Order pave the wave for a common taxonomy that can be explained, understood, used and defended by everyone, it also sets the stage for the ability to apply automation. As digital information has become the norm, replacing paper as the means to create, store and share, the need for better control mechanisms has never been greater. We see evidence of this in the news all the time. Leaks, whether intentional or not, have become more pervasive. However, without a standard approach to classifying information, leveraging technology to help mitigate the risks has been a challenge.

Imagine if you will, the ability to integrate enforceable, digital policies directly into information in a standard fashion that would be recognized government wide. Such policies would give the government the ability to dynamically control who can see information, how long the information is visible, what people can do with it, etc. Wouldn’t it be useful to have policies automatically assigned to documents to minimize the risks of information traveling to the wrong places?

I am quite encouraged to see policy standards such as CUI come about. What are your thoughts?

To learn about technology from Adobe to help, please take a moment and visit this link.

“Why isn’t there a button on your website that I can click to access my personal medical history? A little blue button.”

That simple question was posed to the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA), and proved to be the catalyst for significant improvements in the ways that a veteran can interact with his own health data.

VA developed that Blue Button in collaboration with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Department of Defense, along with the Markle Foundation’s Consumer Engagement Workgroup.

On August 2, 2010 President Obama announced the Blue Button initiative to thousands of applauding veterans, who stood to benefit from the ability to take ownership of their Personal Health Record (PHR), downloaded from the VA website with just a click.
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*Blue Button comments begin at 24:00

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That defining moment, however, was not the end of the story.  Since each veteran’s comprehensive record was to be downloaded as a plain ASCII text file, the Markle and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations issued the Blue Button Developer Challenge on behalf of the VA.  The goal of the challenge was to spur the innovative development of web-based solutions, enabling Blue Button users to meaningfully interact with their health data in an even more useful way.  Sharing that common goal, respondents to the challenge were diverse; ranging from start-up IT companies and individual developers to Google and Microsoft.

On October 7, 2010, Adobe was announced the winner of the Blue Button Developer Challenge.

As the team lead, I had the privilege of receiving the award on Adobe’s behalf at the fourth annual Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco from a distinguished panel featuring Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Peter Levin, Chief Technology Officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Also, I had the opportunity to deliver a presentation, highlighting key features of Blue Button Health Assistant, Adobe’s innovative solution that combines the intuitive real-time interface of Adobe AIR technology with the benefits of the secure, auditable, and ubiquitous PDF format (leveraging PDF-Healthcare Best Practices) regardless of the user’s platform, browser, or device.

Certified PDF screenshot

These benefits resonated well with the discerning team of technology powerhouses who served as judges, including Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark; Assistant Vice President of the Health Group at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Steve Downs; Consumers Union health policy expert Steve Findlay; and personal health records pioneer Dr. James Ralston of Group Health Cooperative.  Submissions were evaluated on the following key criteria:

1. Usefulness to patients in helping them stay healthy or manage their care.
2. Potential to impact health and well-being by addressing high-priority health goals.
3. Platform neutral (can be accessed by a consumer with simple web browser).
4. Usability / ease of use.

As a veteran myself, it was particularly rewarding to be a part of Team Adobe throughout this incredible process. But this story, and others like it, continues on as Adobe identifies and develops more ways to leverage Open Government as more than just a concept, but rather a tool to advance agency missions.

In the final installment of our series, Dave McAllistair, Adobe Director of Open Source and Standards, talks about open government, standards and open source.

Full transcript: OpenSourceStandardsPt3of3.pdf

Dave McAllister, Adobe Director of Open Source and Standards, continues his perspectives on “open” at Adobe. Today, Dave discusses PDF and Flash.

Full transcript: OpenSourceStandardsPt2of3.pdf

Recently, we sat down with Dave McAllister, Adobe Director of Open Source and Standards, to get his perspectives on “open” at Adobe. This is the first segment of a three part interview. In parts two and three, coming later this week, Dave will cover:

-Recent developments at Adobe re: open source and standards
-Discussion of PDF and Flash in terms of open
-Obama’s Open Government Initiative
-What’s next for Adobe in terms of open source and standards

Full transcript: OpenSourceStandardsPt1of3.pdf.

I’ve written about this elusive word “open” in the past. My point was the word can mean many things depending on context and perspective. I think it has become a widely over used, misused word. That said, I was very happy this morning when Adobe took a shot at providing an explanation of what the word “open” means to the company. Even Adobe’s founders, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, weighed in with their thoughts on the topic. (Check it out here.)

Putting this into my own words, to Adobe, “open” equates to freedom of choice. It is a spirit that permeates the culture of the company as well as the technologies it creates. Adobe’s definition is not limited to “open source” or “open standards”, but actually supersedes and embraces these ideas into a bigger concept. Does Adobe take the steps to make every single one of its technologies available as open source or push every one of its protocols into the open standards arena? Of course not. However, many of its core technologies HAVE been offered as open source (Flex, AVM+), granted to open standards bodies (PDF is now ISO 32000) or, at the very least, openly published as specifications (SWF, FLV/F4V, RTMP, AMF) for others to use to create new and unforeseen solutions.

And of course, always remember Adobe’s continued commitment to support and participate in the development of open standards.

So, does it really HAVE to be “Open vs. Choice” or should it be “Open = Choice”? The beauty of this is, everyone gets to decide for themselves!

Healthcare is a complex topic, just ask anyone about their last major surgery or visit to the doctor’s and suddenly you find yourself in a discussion where foreign-sounding words and acronyms are being thrown around. Toss into the mix the topic of information technology and it’s no wonder the current debate and discussion around Health IT becomes exponentially more confusing.

A couple of weeks ago in DC, I was part of a panel discussion on Health IT in the context of the current federal health initiatives and its desired outcomes. We had a solid panel spanning experts on Health IT standards to those that have led projects to provide more reliable health care delivery through the use of technology.

Panelists were:

- Dr. Steven Galson who was the acting surgeon general of the United States (2007-09) and is currently the operations manager for SAIC’s Civilian Health Organization

- Mr. David Walsh who currently chairs the MITA Technical Architecture committee and is president of eServices Group

- Mr. Raymond Sullivan who was the Executive Director of the Veterans Administration Office of Information Technology and is now the VP of Health IT Solution at General Dynamics

The discussion kicked off with some candid comments on the definition of “meaningful use” and the general confusion by both public and private sector on how the regulations translates into the day-to-day operations of providers and payers.

As a guy who’s been around the block more than once in the technology industry, I’ve had the opportunity to witness a plethora of developments, ideas and concepts, some good, some not so good. One particular debate, or perhaps, a point is confusion, is around the word ‘open’. In the early days of computing, groups of like minded individuals came together for the purpose of defining standard ways to ‘do things’. For the most part, these folks realized that it was generally better for the industry as well as the users of technology to establish standards so that systems AND people could work together. There is no doubt that many of these groups have changed the nature of computing and technology for the better. Email flows, the internet works, people can view documents, pictures, listen to music, etc.