At the Health Datapalooza event, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new competition that aims to accelerate innovative solutions to better predict health outcomes and improve the quality of care for patients. Following President Trump’s executive order to prioritize research and development of America’s artificial intelligence capabilities, the CMS Artificial Intelligence Health Outcomes Challenge will unleash innovative solutions as CMS continues to move the healthcare system towards value. Partnering with the American Academy of Family Physicians and the Laur ..read more

Eric D. Hargan, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), spoke at Health Datapalooza. Below are his prepared remarks: Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to speak to you all today. It’s always an honor to speak at Datapalooza, but especially this year, when this gathering marks its tenth anniversary. We’re all here, just like we were last year, because we care about data, and we like talking about the technology we can develop with it. But I want to think about how data and technology fit into the bigger picture: Why is data important? Why are we all ..read more

Bill provides five years of funding for Community Health Centers, Teaching Health Centers, National Health Service Corps, and Special Diabetes Programs which help keep care within reach for millions Senate health committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) today introduced legislation that will extend for five years federal funding for community health centers, and four other federal health programs, that are set to expire at the end of the fiscal year. “This legislation is the first step in ensuring millions of Americans can continue to have acces ..read more

On Tuesday, December 11, the House Energy & Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health held a hearing capping off its oversight of 21st Cures implementation for the outgoing 115th Congress by focusing on the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). The witness was Donald Rucker MD, the National Coordinator for Health IT. Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) said in his opening statement: "The fundamental value proposition of Electronic Health Record systems is the continuity of evidence-based care, however, patient health data continue to be fragmented and diffi ..read more

I was very honored to appear on John Gilroy's TechTalk show on Federal News Radio. The interview ran the gamut from artificial intelligence and blockchain, to health IT certification and interoperability ..read more

As we approach the 2020's it is helpful to discover how we got here I have been looking back at all of the work accomplished on health data exchange as well as some of the challenges which still remain. In 2008 most of our healthcare system was still paper-based. Less than 10% of hospitals had implemented even a basic electronic health record system (EHR). As we can see from the data above, provided by the Office of the Nation Coordinator (ONC), a great deal of progress had occurred over the next seven years. Of course, much of this was due to the federal incentives for EHR adoption incorpora ..read more

MIT CSAIL's cryptographic system encourages transparency w/public log of data requests When the FBI filed a court order in 2016 commanding Apple to unlock the San Bernandino shooter’s iPhone, the news made headlines across the globe.  Meanwhile, every day there are thousands of court orders asking tech companies to turn over people’s private data. These requests often require some secrecy: companies usually aren’t allowed to inform individual users that they’re being investigated, and the court orders themselves are also temporarily hidden from the public.  In many cases, though ..read more

System enables people to correct robot mistakes on multi-choice problems Getting robots to do things isn’t easy: usually scientists have to either explicitly program them or get them to understand how humans communicate via language. But what if we could control robots more intuitively, using just hand gestures and brainwaves? A new system spearheaded by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) aims to do exactly that, allowing users to instantly correct robot mistakes with nothing more than brain signals and the flick of a finger. Building off ..read more

AI and Industry 4.0The entire world is feeling the impact of established and emerging artificial intelligence techniques tools. This is transforming society and all areas of business including healthcare and biomedicine, retail and finance, transportation and auto, and all verticals. Marketing and communications is certainly being transformed through artificial intelligence techniques. Manufacturing is at the beginning of a major upheaval as automation and machine learning rewrite the rules of work. We are seeing applications in construction and additive manufacturing, as well as self-driving ..read more

Compatible with smartphone cameras, MIT CSAIL system for seeing around corners could help with self-driving cars and search-and-rescue Earlier this year researchers at Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh recognized, there is a way to tease out information on the object even from apparently random scattered light. Their method, published in Nature Photonics, relies on laser range-finding technology, which measures the distance to an object based on the time it takes a pulse of light to travel to the object, scatter, and travel back to a detector. And now further research has ..read more