A majority of Americans now favor development of a nationwide health information network, according to a poll taken this month for the Health Information and Management Systems Society.

Pollster Gary Ferguson of the firm American Viewpoint reported that 57 percent of those surveyed approved of developing a NHIN, while 30 percent opposed it. The remaining 12 percent said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion.

However, most of those polled said a presidential candidate’s position on NHIN development would make no difference in their decision on whether to vote for that candidate.

Ferguson said health care has become the top domestic political issue, but he and another pollster, Mark Mellman of the Mellman Group, said health IT is not a central concern of many voters.

Representatives of five presidential candidates outlined their positions on health IT yesterday at HIMSS’ annual public policy forum in Washington.

Although some in the audience complained of an absence of details in the platforms, Fred Hannett of the Capitol Alliance, chairman of the HIMSS Government Relations Roundtable, said it was notable that most of the major candidates had health IT planks in their platforms at all...

Defense Department Secretary Robert Gates has issued a new job description for Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, making him the department’s first chief management officer.

The designation is included in a Sept. 18 directive signed by Gates. The document includes four paragraphs outlining England’s duties as CMO.

In his new role, England has the lead in ensuring the Pentagon’s business functions are in sync with the military’s warfighting missions, according to the document. In addition, England is responsible for establishing performance goals and measures for improving the efficiency of DOD’s processes, the document states.

England also must develop a DOD-wide strategic plan for business reform, Gates' directive reads.

Pentagon officials, including England, have previously resisted calls by Congress and the Government Accountability Office to create the CMO post. They have argued the job would add a layer of bureaucracy to decision-making proces

The House Homeland Security Committee approved legislation today that would toughen the requirements on the Coast Guard’s Deepwater program and improve the implementation of the Transportation Worker Identification Card (TWIC).

The committee revised three sections of the Coast Guard Authorization bill passed by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that deal with port security, the Coast Guard modernization program and TWIC.

The Homeland Security Committee unanimously approved the substitute bill by voice vote.

“We developed the substitute in collaboration with many members of this committee,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the ho meland security panel. “It provides an additional $229 million in resources for Deepwater, but also strengthens the Coast Guard’s management of this program. TWIC is area of concern that we addressed in this report too. The [substitute bill] is a reflection of committee’s oversight of the Coast Guard.”

The bill would authorize $8.3 billion for the Coast Guard in fiscal 2008, including more than $1 billion for Deepwater...

The Energy Department and a consortium of information technology companies want to start making data centers more environmentally efficient.

The agency and the Green Grid have signed a memorandum of understanding to get data centers worldwide to implement energy-management programs and adopt clean-energy technologies.

In addition, the organizations could collaborate on developing a common set of metrics and tools, and develop a Web site so businesses can access those tools. The partnership may also train personnel to conduct energy-saving assessments and point research and development in a direction that would make data center operations more efficient.

“Data centers represent an important part of the information and economy, and joining forces with the Green Grid puts us on a path to identify and build the necessary tools for thousands of data centers to more easily capture energy savings,” said Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alexan

Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne announced today that he appointed Maj. Gen. William Lord as commander of the Air Force Cyber Command.

Lord currently is the director for cyberspace transformation and strategy in the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Warfighting Integration. In that capacity, he is responsible for establishing cyberspace as an Air Force domain and for the development of doctrine, strategy and policy with respect to cyberspace.

Lt. Gen. Robert Elder, commander of the 8th Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base, La., has been heading up Air Force cyberwarfare operations since earlier this year.

Before assuming his current position, Lord commanded the 81st Training Wing in Keesler Air Force Base, Miss.

The Air Force announced it would create a Cyber Command in November 2006. At that time it also named cyberspace as one of its mission domains, along with air and space.

Wynne announced the official inauguration of the Cyber Command Sept...

Michael Jackson, deputy secretary at the Homeland Security Department, announced his resignation Sept. 24. Jackson, who has been second in command to Secretary Michael Chertoff since March 2005, will stay at his post until Oct. 26.

Jackson previously served as deputy secretary and chief operating officer of the Transportation Department from May 2001 to August 2003. In that position, he helped create the new Transportation Security Administration as part of DHS.

Jackson left TSA to become senior vice president of AECOM Technology, where he was chief operating officer of the government services group before accepting the deputy secretary position at DHS.

“I want to thank Deputy Secretary Jackson for his loyal service and for coming to the aid of his country in a time of need,” Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, wrote in a news release. “He has been instrumental in helping the department tackle some of the most pressing security problems facing the country today...

The prospect of war in space has led to some strategic thinking at the Defense Department about the future of U.S. satellites.

The galvanizing event came in January when China destroyed one of its weather satellites by launching a ground-based ballistic missile.

Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne, speaking in Washington Sept. 19, called the incident an egregious act and added that the Chinese were sending a message to the U.S. military that China now views space as a battlefield.

"We were not surprised; we were shocked," Wynne said, at the symposium sponsored by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense policy think tank in Washington. "What was shocking about it was the denial."

The Chinese government has never clearly acknowledged that it carried out the Jan. 11 incident.

Future enemies "want to make sure that you will not want to get involved" in a conflict, Wynne said. China’s satellite shoot-down came “to tell us, ‘Don't think you're safe up there,'" he said...

As the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration reviews vendor bids to develop the congressionally mandated federal spending database, another private-sector entity has launched its own version.

Global Computer Enterprises Inc., which runs the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation for GSA, unveiled FFATA.org last week to provide search capability for all contract actions since 1979 and all grant actions since fiscal 2000.

Mare Lucas, GCE’s director of communications, today said during a demonstration of FFATA.org in Washington that the goal of the search portal is to make the information easy to find by taking out the government jargon. GCE already had the procurement data and adding the grants data wasn’t that difficult, she said.

GCE joins OMBWatch as nongovernment organizations developing sites that meet the spirit of the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA).

Meanwhile, GSA and OMB are reviewing proposals from a request for quote issued in August...

With a week left in fiscal 2007 and no appropriations bills at the White House, President Bush urged Congress today to pass a continuing resolution with no strings attached.

Bush told a group of business leaders that legislators should pass the resolution to keep the government running at current funding levels, but the resolution should include no new spending or policies, unless the president and Congress agree in advance on them.

But House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) said in a statement that he met with Jim Nussle, director of the Office of Management and Budget, last week and told him Congress intends to pass a clean resolution. He said he offered Nussle the chance to bring up any exceptions the Bush administration wanted to include in the legislation.

“And they sent us over a dozen changes that they wanted,” he said. “Telling the Congress to pass a clean continuing resolution is the equivalent of the rooster claiming credit for the sunrise.”

Obey said the president shouldn’t manufacture an argument when there isn’t one...

With lawmakers still debating changes in funding strategies for the nation's aviation system, the House on Monday voted to extend the Federal Aviation Administration’s current funding authorization through Dec. 31.

The extension is designed to give members of the House more time to reach agreement with their Senate counterparts over how the agency should be funded. 

The current funding structure is set to expire at the end of the month. The House passed its version of the FAA funding bill last week, while the Senate proposal is still pending.

The battle over how to fund the agency and improvements to the air traffic control system has grown increasingly contentious between commercial-airline advocates and representatives of general aviation -- owners and pilots of private and corporate aircraft. Representatives of commercial airlines contend that general aviation is not paying its share of operating costs and that user fees should be introduced.

Meanwhile, general-aviation advocates argue that the tax-based system is capable of raising enough money to pay for national aviation improvements and that user fees would unfairly benefit commercial airlines.

Last week the House seemed to agree in principle with general aviation...

Faced with his state falling behind in the growing movement for health care reform, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland issued an executive order to create an advisory board to coordinate public and private efforts in building a statewide health information technology infrastructure.

A major goal of the new Ohio Health Information Partnership Advisory Board, which will be chaired by the state’s chief information officer, will be to develop an operational plan from recommendations made in a strategic roadmap developed by the Health Policy Institute of Ohio and in a plan issued by the Ohio Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration.

The fact is that Ohio is “behind the curve in doing something like this,” said Jason Sanford, communications director at the Health Policy Institute area.

“Ohio works through a kind of 'city state'  approach to these things, so there’s been a lot of things happening but no one’s been talking to anyone else about what they are doing,” he said...

In a replay of almost three years ago, the Treasury Department has awarded AT&T a contract valued at up to $270 million for network services under the General Services Administration’s Networx Universal contract. Treasury originally awarded AT&T a $1 billion, 10-year contract in December 2004 under the Treasury Communications Enterprise, now called TNet.

Treasury is the second department to award a task order under the $48 billion Networx contracting vehicle. The Homeland Security Department awarded a task order in June for its OneNet intranet for sensitive but unclassified information to three vendors, which will compete to be DHS’ primary and secondary service providers.

Last December, under pressure from GSA, the Office of Management and Budget, and Congress, Treasury agreed to participate in the governmentwide Networx program to integrate its telecommunications requirements into a single Treasury network infrastructure. Under the Networx program, Treasury will use a fully managed network service, supported by service-level agreements and performance incentives to provide secure voice, data and video communications...

The International Association of Dental and Medical Disciplines (IAMD) last week launched a campaign to cure what ails many physician offices: the lack of a Web site.

“It takes time to create a Web site and it’s often very expensive and complicated, and my belief is that doctors are just too busy to get started,” said Dr. John Ryan, DMD, founder of IADMD, which is based in Salem, N.H.

His solution is to offer easy, inexpensive and fast Web site design and hosting. For a flat fee of $1,899, the IADMD will provide doctors with a custom URL address; state-of-the-art flash graphics; a communications portal that gives doctors the ability to speak to their colleagues without conversations being visible to patients or anyone outside of the group; and e-commerce functionality so doctors can immediately begin processing credit card transactions online.

Physicians log onto the site, choose from several templates and provide their information and images. The individual Web site is usually running 24 hours later.

“There are no hooks, gimmicks or strings attached,” Ryan said, noting that the response has been extremely positive...

The House Homeland Security Committee has requested that the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general investigate cyberattacks on DHS that originated from Chinese-language Web sites and actions by Unisys that the committee called incompetent and possibly illegal and may have failed to detect the intrusions. Unisys built and maintains the networks for DHS headquarters and the Transportation Security Administration.

Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and James Langevin (D-R.I.), chairman of the committee’s Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology Subcommittee, also seek a review of the department officials who oversee management of the contract, the lawmakers said in their Sept. 21 letter to DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner.

Unisys provided inaccurate and misleading information to DHS about the source of the attacks and attempted to hide security gaps, the lawmakers said in their letter. Furthermore, DHS officials did not act on the information once they were informed...

Researchers in New York have issued a report that examines the task of coordinating a regional response to events that disrupt telecommunications networks.

The Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the University at Albany produced the report earlier this month in conjunction with the New York State Department of Public Service. The department serves as the staff arm of the state’s public service commission, which regulates utilities, including telecommunications.

The report stems from a one-day CTG workshop that pulled together industry and government representatives, primarily from the metropolitan New York area. Theresa Pardo, CTG’s deputy director, said the group discussed the knowledge gap that exists among key players in telecom.

“They recognize the importance of doing something about it,” she said.

The report cited the need to address the “gap in current knowledge about the roles and responsibilities of individual organizations in subnational incidents.” The document also noted a lack of clarity regarding “who has what information at any point in time that could be brought to bear on incident response.”

Another finding was the criticality of trust and cross-boundary information sharing...

With private security firm Blackwater USA under fire for its role in a recent shooting incident in Baghdad, new details are emerging about another problem involving contractors in Iraq: the working and living conditions of international laborers employed on U.S. government projects.

According to internal Defense Department documents, contractors working for the military in Iraq exploited international laborers in 2006, despite updated DOD regulations prohibiting such practices.

Early this year, Air Force Maj. Gen. Daryl Scott, who oversees all contracting activities for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote to senior DOD leaders that problems involving contractors’ treatment of international workers, which the military found in 2006, were ongoing.

Officials at the Joint Contracting Command-Iraq/Afghanistan, which Scott leads, found evidence in March 2006 that contractors and subcontractors working for the U.S. government had confiscated laborers’ passports, used deceptive hiring practices, funneled workers into Iraq by circumventing local immigration procedures and housed workers in substandard conditions.

Many of those practices fall into an area legal scholars call trafficking in persons.

Officials at Multi-National Force-Iraq did not respond to requests for comments.

Rep...

The Food and Drug Administration will hold a public meeting Oct. 19 at its offices in Rockville, Md., to solicit ideas on how to further automate the review of new drugs.

The meeting will focus on the degree to which FDA should align its IT systems with the health IT standards being harmonized and adopted by other arms of the Health and Human Services Department.

The agency announced the meeting in a Federal Register notice today. The notice states that the meeting’s scope will include, among other areas, these items:

• How can agency architecture and IT solutions best be applied to support the FDA’s public health mission?
• What would help improve the quality and quantity of electronic submissions from drug companies to the agency?
• What data standards are needed to implement these improvements?
• How should FDA coordinate with stakeholders on the adoption and implementation of data standards?
• What data standards areas provide the greatest challenge?
• What approaches will facilitate the most effective and efficient adoption and implementation of data standards?
• What lessons learned and best practices should FDA consider as we transition from program-specific to enterprise IT solutions using a reusable and modular model?

The meeting also will cover how best to work with the public, the drug companies, researchers and other stakeholders in IT planning and development...

Today's federal civilian workforce is too large, according to Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, and if elected president, he would rely on new technologies rather than replace all of the federal workers who are expected to retire in the coming decade.

Agency managers are scrambling to come up with ways to attract younger workers to government jobs because more than 40 percent of the federal workforce is eligible to retire in the next 10 years. However, the government would be better off following the lead of the private sector and increasing its investment in technology instead, Giuliani said at a Sept. 21 breakfast sponsored by the Northern Virginia Technology Council.

“One of the things that I promote is to reduce the size of the federal workforce,” he said. “The civilian workforce is just too big. Forty-two percent are coming up for retirement. I wouldn’t rehire half of them.”

Throughout the speech, the former New York mayor emphasized the importance of new technologies to the future of the country...

The Housing and Urban Development Department has awarded a $42.6 million contract to G&B Solutions of McLean, Va., to provide program management services and institutionalize program management approaches departmentwide.

G&B will implement standard processes and assist HUD offices in making IT investments that are sound and adaptable by others in the department, said Walter Harris, HUD’s deputy chief information officer for business and information technology modernization.

G&B officials said the company will also provides services related to strategic planning, organizational development, enterprise data management and business process re-engineering. The duration of the contract is five years.

The contractor will assist HUD's Office of the CIO by training and augmenting its staff and helping the office deliver new services, such as systems engineering and integration.

A year after New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch said he wanted his state to become the first to enable e-prescribing for all of its health care providers, a health insurer has launched a program to do that.

The program provides licensed health practitioners with free e-prescribing software, a free mobile pocket PC, and a discounted wireless  plan through Sprint that gives the providers the ability to write and renew prescriptions from either in or outside their offices.

The only proviso is that the practitioners, although they can also do business through other companies, must be an Anthem subscriber. But “there’s literally only  a handful” of the 3,900 health care providers in the state who are not Anthem subscribers, said Elizabeth Malko, medical director for Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Hampshire.

Physicians can also use the program to prescribe for patients beyond Anthem’s covered members, something that Charles Kennedy, vice president of health information technology for WellPoint, Inc., Anthem’s parent company, said was a tactical necessity.

The program "would not have been accepted by physicians if it could only be used with Anthem patients,” he said.

With communications enabled through both RxHub, LLC, which provides the secure patient data-exchange infrastructure, and SureScripts’ Pharmacy Health Information Exchange network, all the components are now in place for end-to-end e-prescribing across the state, Kennedy said.

However, he said, providing the means to do e-prescribing and actually getting physicians to use that capability are two different things...

Some sensitive data of veterans remains at risk even though the Veterans Affairs Department has begun improvements to improve information security, according to the latest report from the Government Accountability Office.

VA still has not fully put in place most previous GAO recommendations and the department’s inspector general to strengthen information technology security, according to the report.

“Because these recommendations have not yet been implemented, unnecessary risk exists that personal information of veterans and others would be exposed to data tampering, fraud, and inappropriate disclosure,” said Gregory Wilshusen, GAO’s director of information security issues in a report released this week. He also testified this week at a hearing the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.

VA has plans for correcting weaknesses. However, it has not implemented a comprehensive security management program nor ensured consistent use of information security performance standards, for example, for appraising senior VA executives, the report said...

Office of Management and Budget officials believe a standard computer desktop configuration will dramatically improve security governmentwide, said Karen Evans, OMB’s administrator for e-government and information technology. Agencies upgrading their computers to Microsoft Windows XP or Vista must adopt the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) standard by February 2008, she said.

Agencies otherwise will move to the FDCC standard when they plan to update their computers, she said. OMB published three memos this year on plans for the standard configuration.

The Security Content Automation Program (SCAP) is automated software that can help agencies implement the standard configuration by monitoring adherence to the configuration by applications and system vulnerabilities.

Not all agencies support a standard configuration. Some people are concerned, however, that OMB and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have been so transparent in publishing documents for the FDCC standard and SCAP that hackers could exploit vulnerabilities, she said.

“It is possible that we could be vulnerable, but right now, I would have to say that we can’t be more vulnerable than where we are today,” Evans said today at a security conference sponsored by NIST...

The House passed a bill today to keep the Federal Aviation Administration flying through 2011, but a threat from the White House to ground the plan and a different approach from the Senate mean the agency’s budget is still up in the air.

Lawmakers have been under increasing pressure this summer to pass a budget plan for the agency as it looks to implement new solutions to battle record air congestion and flight delays through its NextGen program, which will cost $15 billion to $22 billion.

Advocates of the House bill say it would provide record funding for improvements to the U.S. air system while maintaining the current tax and financing structure. The measure would adjust the general-aviation jet fuel tax from 21.8 cents per gallon to almost 36 cents a gallon and raise commercial costs from 19.3 cents per gallon to 24.1 cents per gallon. It would also increase passenger facility charges – the amount fliers pay to airports -- from $4.50 to $7. That change would raise $1.1 billion per year, advocates say...

Lawmakers today expressed frustration and disbelief over the continued shortcomings of information technology projects across the federal government.

Because research by committee staff members has found that one in five information technology projects in government needed to be rebaselined and one in six projects don’t have qualified project managers, some senators questioned how much of the $65 billion agencies spend on IT is being wasted.

“The Office of Management and Budget must address the root causes of these problem projects,” said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services and International Security Subcommittee.

“Maybe projects shouldn’t go forward until they have a qualified project manager,” Coburn said. “It may delay the project, but it will save money and the end result will be better.”

At a hearing on IT management, Coburn questioned why the Office of Management and Budget continues to allow agencies to invest in and run projects that are on the administration’s High-Risk and Management Watch lists...

Officials at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service plan to trim the agency’s workforce from almost 14,000 employees to less than 10,000 by 2011, DFAS Director Zack Gaddy said.

The move is one of several steps the agency is taking to improve the speed and quality of its services, Gaddy said Sept. 18 at the Defense Finance 2007 conference in Alexandria, Va. Worldwide Business Research organized the event.

DFAS is the financial and accounting arm of the Defense Department. Its tasks include paying DOD civilian and military personnel, managing military retirement and health benefit funds, and accounting for DOD’s foreign military sales.

Besides trimming the number of employees, Gaddy also wants to change the composition of DFAS’ workforce. The goal is to reverse the current mix of 70 percent technical workers and 30 percent professional experts by 2011, he said. In the process, the ratio of one supervisor for every eight workers is slated to change to 15 or more workers per boss, he added...

Westchester County, N.Y., has become the first locality in the United States to join an international network of technology-oriented cities.

The Global Digital City Network (GDCN), founded in 2000, has 13 members. The network's purpose is to provide a forum for information sharing and to promote joint initiatives. Westchester County accepted an invitation to join GDCN in August, during the network’s general annual meeting in Dundee, Scotland.

The county, which is north of New York City, plans to use the network to generate new business opportunities for local companies and promote Westchester as a location for investment. Large companies such as IBM and Nokia are in the county. The technology sectors represented there include software, telecommunications, security and animation, said Scott Fernqvist, special assistant to the county’s chief information officer.

In addition to Westchester, members of the invitation-only network include
Kakamigahara and Inuyama City in Japan; Chuncheon in South Korea; Dalian, Jilin, Shenyang and Yanji in China; Dubai in the United Arab Emirates; Dundee; Gold Coast City in Australia; Nizhny Novgorod in Russia; and Taipei in Taiwan...

Because of a switch in servers taking place the evening of Sept. 21, FCW.com will have a new IP address: 216.70.54.85. To ensure you have seamless access to our Web site, please let your IT staff know of this change.

Thank you,
FCW staff

By a wide margin, analysts at the Government Accountability Office voted Sept. 19 to be represented by a labor union. The vote was 897 to 445 in favor of representation by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. About 1,813 GAO employees were eligible to vote in the election.

Jacqueline Hogg, a senior analyst at GAO and one of four official union observers during the vote count, said employees who supported the union were ecstatic about the results.

“Our slogan for this campaign was ‘band together,’ and that’s exactly what we did,” she said. “Over the past 18 months, we came together regardless of pay band, years of service and whether we worked in D.C. or the field. This vote reflects that spirit of unity.”

In a statement, Comptroller General David Walker, head of GAO, thanked the employees who took the time to vote and said GAO managers will bargain in good faith.

Employees will next elect a council, write a constitution, determine bargaining priorities and negotiate a first contract with GAO managers.

Union President Gregory Junemann said the national union’s involvement in the employees’ next steps will likely be limited...

The Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), the organization that seeks to reconcile mismatched and conflicting health data standards, is asking for public comment on three draft interoperability specifications and a use case for medication management.

The four documents will be the basis of the organization’s next set of recommendations to the American Health Information Community, the advisory panel led by Mike Leavitt, secretary of the Health and Human Services Department.

The interoperability specifications address issues of quality and consumer access to health care information. Comments will help the HITSP technical committees select appropriate standards and aid in the development of detailed guidance on how to implement the standards, according to an HITSP announcement.

The public can submit comments online using HITSP’s automated tracking system through Oct. 16.

The Small Business Administration’s program to develop businesses in underutilized business districts is riddled with holes, leaving it open to fraud, Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the House Small Business Committee, said Sept. 19.

Although 14,200 businesses are in the Historically Underutilized Business Zones program, SBA does only 500 examinations annually. Meanwhile, SBA approves 2,000 companies to join the program each year, she said. More astonishing, a preliminary review by the committee found multimillion-dollar homes in areas SBA dubbed HUBZones, she said

“This is not exactly what one would expect for an initiative designed to spur development in low-income areas,” Velazquez said at a committee hearing on abuses in several SBA programs.

She recommended that SBA officials apply more resources to oversight but also create surer ways to weed out the bad apples.

“There is not only flaws in the program and how it’s being used and abused but also that it requires immediate action,” she said...

Agencies are steadily pushing higher the percentage of their programs that perform effectively, even as they measure more programs each year, the Office of Management and Budget said.

In its latest assessment, OMB rated 78 percent of agency programs as performing, compared with 75 percent last year. Of the programs that were assessed for the first time, 77 percent were rated as performing, while 60 percent were effective or moderately effective.

“Our ultimate goal is to make programs work better,” said Clay Johnson, OMB’s deputy director for management.

Agencies use the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), which consists of a scoring system for answers to 25 questions, to measure success. It provides a consistent and transparent approach to evaluate programs.

PART ratings can influence agencies, OMB and Congress on funding, authorization and oversight decisions for the programs, Johnson said. To emphasize that point, OMB moved release of the PART assessments to September so agencies and OMB could use this up-to-date information in the development of the president’s budget.

“While never the only factor in decisions about program budgets, performance should be an increasingly important factor,” Johnson said.

Agency programs saw better ratings because they have adopted more effective performance measures and improved the data gathering of those measures, said Robert Shea, OMB’s associate director for management...

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ newly awarded $4 billion contracting vehicle creates an information technologyresource that could help the agency deal with the expected sharp rise in the number of health benefits recipients.

CMS earlier this week tapped 16 contractors – eight large businesses and eight small and/or 8(a) firms – for the decade-long Enterprise Systems Development program (ESD). The indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity vehicle will provide services ranging from application design to software maintenance.

A CMS spokesman characterized ESD as a flexible IT vehicle that can respond to both present requirements and future needs. When asked whether the vehicle targets specific software or service-delivery initiatives, the spokesman responded that the contracts are not limited to specific projects.

However, upgrading the state of CMS technology stands out as an overarching goal of the vehicle.

“One of their main objectives is IT modernization,” said Cheryl Campbell, vice president at CGI Federal’s Public Sector Health Group and account manager for the ESD contract...

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt today described the government’s role in developing a new generation of personalized health care, emphasizing health information technology as a keystone of that effort.

“The potential is huge – for protecting health, for preventing and pre-empting disease and for personalizing treatment according to each person’s unique biology,” he said in a speech at a conference on personalized medicine.

HHS also issued a 75-page report, “Personalized Health Care: Opportunities, Pathways, Resources,” that describes the many steps HHS and other federal agencies are taking to develop standards, tools and other ingredients of personalized health care.

Genomics is perhaps the most important new aspect of personalized health care, and HHS and its agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, have many projects underway to increase understanding of genetics and how genetic information is cataloged and retrieved.

As those projects bear fruit, he said, it will be possible to tailor treatments to individuals, based on their genetic makeup and medical history...

The Defense Department is testing a process to automate system
vulnerability collection data from across the services and military
agencies.

The Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) eventually will use Web
services and a service-oriented architecture to scan as many as 1
million information technology assets to manage vulnerabilities and deal
with possible threats.

SCAP will help DOD, and eventually other agencies, examine how security
content automation will help achieve compliance with the Federal
Information Security Management Act and other cybersecurity directives
and improve overall IT security.

"The pilot using the SCAP protocols will give us more advanced
capabilities and optimize current business practices," said Ryan Larson,
of the National Security Agency's systems information assurance systems engineering office. "We want to develop plans to implement Web services to expose network defense data enterprisewide."

The Army tested about 30,000 assets, which gave the service a better
understanding of what was vulnerable and what was safe, DOD officials
said today at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
Security Automation Conference...

The biggest problem with post-Hurricane Katrina emergency procurements is that few local companies understand how federal procurement works, Tina Burnette, acquisitions director at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has said.

“The problem is trying to get these local communities acclimated to federal contracting,” Burnette said Sept. 18 as part of a panel of federal emergency officials at an event of the Bethesda, Md., chapter of AFCEA International.

She said federal acquisitions laws are so complicated that large companies sometimes hire consultants to teach acquisitions employees how the they work.

Adding to the confusion, a number of new acquisitions regulations were introduced for emergency situations after the huuricane, and one stipulates that disaster relief funds be used to hire local companies.

“We’re trying to stimulate the economy where the disaster happened so you can rebuild it,” she said.

Burnette said FEMA is working with the Ge

The Army's battlefield communications will get some improvements with help from General Dynamics and its primary subcontractor, Lockheed Martin, under a $921 million contract the service awarded Sept. 18.

The contract covers Increments Two and Three of the Army’s Warfighter Information Network–Tactical program, including development of initial WIN-T capabilities, early fielding of the technologies in Increment Two, and continued development of WIN-T components to expand their capacity, security and mobility in Increment Three.

The contract award follows the Army’s June restructuring of its Joint Network Node–Network initiative into the four-phase WIN-T program, which encompassed JNN-N as Increment One. JNN-N seeks to develop and field a mobile tactical network that will deliver voice, data and imagery to soldiers at the company level. The Army launched JNN-N in 2004 to replace its aging Mobile Subscriber Equipment battlefield communications gear.

In the contracts awarded this week, the portion that covers WIN-T Increment Two is valued at $126 million and is for development of an initial mobile broadband network of satellite and radio links and early fielding of the capability beginning in 2009.

The portion that covers WIN-T Increment Three is worth $795 million and covers additional development of network components to augment their capacity, security and mobility, with user testing scheduled to start in 2011...

The Homeland Security Department is running out of time to test and deploy a new technology solution in a proposed identification card that would be an alternative to passports by summer 2008, an industry expert said.

“I doubt it is possible to meet the deadline,” Randy Vanderhoof, executive director at the Smart Card Alliance, told Washington Technology. “Standing up a new technology platform in that time frame is not realistic.”

The proposed People Access Security Services (Pass) cards are intended to serve as a low-cost alternative to passports to meet the requirements of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI). Secretary Michael Chertoff has said that the initiative will be fully in effect by next summer, requiring all travelers in the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean to carry passports, Pass cards or other approved documents.

According to DHS officials, the Pass cards are to have Generation 2 Radio Frequency Identification tags...

The biggest challenges the Veterans Affairs Department faces are reducing the backlog of disability claims and smoothing the transition of soldiers from the Defense Department to VA care, said VA Secretary James Nicholson, as he prepares to leave government.

VA also must determine how to solve the problem of aging hospitals and other facilities as the demand for their use is increasing. Nicholson steps down Oct. 1.

The House Veterans' Affairs Committee praised the secretary for how he readily accepted responsibility and responded to challenges as they emerged, sometimes by surprise.

Since Nicholson became secretary in early 2005, the VA faced a $2 billion budget shortfall, a growing claims backlog and a data breach involving 26.5 million veterans and active-duty personnel, and another incident earlier this year in Birmingham, Ala., said House Veterans Affairs Chairman Bob Filner (D-Calif.).

“The VA has made strides toward meeting its goal of being the gold standard in [information technology] security, but much work remains to be done,” Filner said...

EDS of Plano, Texas, will run the second of two major data centers for the Homeland Security Department under an $800 million, eight-year contract the department awarded the company, according to EDS and industry sources.

“It’s a very important contract to us,” EDS spokesman Brad Bass said, adding that neither the company nor the department had yet announced the award.

“We would like to talk about it, but we are restricted in what we can say,” Bass said. “There are national security considerations here.”

“We are going to march to what [DHS officials] say [regarding the data center], he added. “We are looking at a total of eight years.”

DHS already activated its first major data center at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The second center will act as a mirrored backup to the first.

In framing the request for proposals for the second data center, DHS emphasized that it wanted to ensure an extremely high level of physical security for the facility...

A workgroup of the American Health Information Community has recommended a series of steps to modernize the country’s public health infrastructure.

AHIC’s chairman, Health and Human Services Department Secretary Mike Leavitt, called the recommendations “very big thinking” and said some would take acts of Congress to accomplish. But he applauded them and said HHS would start developing budgets and timetables to get the modernization under way.

Despite spending in recent years to equip public health departments at the state and local levels with new systems, the spending has continued to be targeted for specific purposes such as HIV surveillance or food-borne illness reporting, the workgroup said in a report to Leavitt.

The resulting siloed systems cannot communicate with one another within a jurisdiction or with their peers in other jurisdictions, the workgroup said. It called for interoperability, security and functionality standards to ensure that spending results in a more robust and flexible infrastructure...