Page 44 - FCW, November/December 2019

P ublic Sector Innovations
from months to days.
The foundry will also enable Kessel Run
to abstract and manage cloud deployments and virtualized environments across multiple classification levels within a year, Stollar said.
“The Air Force’s investment in PCF as a single consistent path to production frees developers to focus on executing ‘balanced approach’ agile development,” he said. “This gives developers time to define a lean minimum viable product, engage with end users to refine features and ultimately build software versus configuring their unique pipelines or paths to deployment.”
Mainframe as a Service
Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security
Customs and Border Protection relies
on massive amounts of data for its mission-critical operations in support of international travel and trade. All that
data — from people and other IT systems in industry and government — requires heavy- duty mainframe computing to process.
That traditional bulk computing capability becomes increasingly expensive and high- maintenance as it ages.
To find more effective mainframe computing, the agency turned to scalable and consumption-based IT services — or mainframe as a service (MFaaS). The move followed similar infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service realignments CBP made to comply with the Office of Management and Budget’s data center consolidation policy and federal cloud migration mandates.
MFaaS enables mission-critical functions to continue reliably and securely while reducing costs. CBP officials said MFaaS gives them the flexibility to develop, test and deploy targeted applications for border security and trade facilitation while allowing systems to adjust to changes in processing, throughput and capacity requirements.
Thanks to MFaaS, CBP migrated portions
of its Automated Commercial Environment to IBM’s SmartCloud this year. ACE is a data- heavy transactional system that the shipping import/export industry uses to move their products in and out of U.S. ports efficiently and securely.
Officials believe their use of MFaaS can be a model for other agencies that want to adopt cutting-edge technologies, such as cognitive-based computing and blockchain, without having to implement a heavy metal mainframe infrastructure to support it.
Modernizing Medical Records Processing with Intelligent Automation
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Department of Health and Human Services
To limit the amount of federal funds going to fraudsters, the government requires agencies to review their disbursements to identify and recover improper payments.
At the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, employees would conduct an annual, manual audit of more than 50,000 unstructured medical records, often reviewing hundreds of pages of documents to verify that diagnosis codes were supported by medical documentation. With the volume of records expected to increase each year, CMS needed a better option.
The agency created the Intake Process Automation tool, which digitizes records by using advanced optical character recognition and applying natural language processing to understand the language and context of the data. The tool extracts information such as patient name, date of birth, provider type, date of service and other fields requiring confirmation. IPA validates extracted data fields and identifies potential issues based on predefined business rules and coding guidance. It then updates the CMS system with results from the reviews. If the tool doesn’t have high confidence in the decision it made, the record will go to a person for verification.
By automating the initial evaluation of
medical records, CMS has been able to vastly speed processing of the reviews, increase accuracy and allow employees to spend
their time analyzing exceptions instead
of verifying existing records. CMS also saves money and delivers faster feedback to insurers and providers on the validity of medical records submitted to support payments.
MyPass
Innovation Office, City of Austin, Texas
Officials in Austin, Texas, are working on a blockchain-powered digital ID that would give people experiencing homelessness a secure way to store and access the personal records they need to obtain services such as housing, employment and health care.
Called MyPass, the ID would hold information such as Social Security number, criminal justice records and medical history. The city is working with technology partners to create what might eventually look like a digital public notary, said Kerry O’Connor, the city’s chief innovation officer.
The idea is that people would scan and upload their information onto a web-based platform, where a digital notary would validate and verify that information before putting it into a digital locker and appending the metadata to the blockchain. Service providers would be able to access only the data they needed.
“It’s a big open-ended question that we’re trying to solve for the actual interaction on the ground,” O’Connor said.
She expects MyPass to save money because of the reduction in duplicative records, but more importantly, it would
ease access to services for the city’s 7,000 people experiencing homelessness. People in that situation need access to housing, mental health services and their prescription medications, O’Connor said, adding that “these are all pieces of their identity that this platform would empower them to share across the system in order to get the services they need.”
42 November/December 2019 FCW.COM