Unmanned high-tech balloon used in hunt for alleged murderer

This high-tech balloon, equipped with cameras, is on loan to the Pennsylvania State Police from the Ohio Department of Transportation. (Credit: Pennsylvania State Police)

After more than a month on the trail of murder suspect Eric Frein, authorities in Pennsylvania have yet again taken to the skies for their search — but this time, they’re not using a helicopter.

According to the Pennsylvania State Police, the search now includes a large Mylar balloon, classified as an unmanned aircraft system, that contains several cameras that can monitor the ground from the air. The balloon is on loan from the Ohio Department of Transportation, which currently operates UAS under a certificate of authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration, according to a list of COAs obtained by MuckRock’s Shawn Musgrave via the Freedom of Information Act.

Murder Suspect Eric Frein (Credit: FBI)

FedScoop reached out to the FAA to confirm that the balloon would still operate under the Ohio DOT’s COA in Pennsylvania, but did not receive a confirmation by publication time.

The balloon resembles a weather balloon, Pennsylvania State Police Public Information Officer Trooper Connie Devens told FedScoop, and is tethered to a stationary point on the ground. In the past month of the search for the fugitive, the state police have used helicopters with thermal imaging to examine the dense, wooded area where Frein may be hiding; however, through the use of the balloon, the state police will cut costs and provide a silent way to conduct the search.

According to information about the balloon provided by its manufacturer, the maximum airborne height is 480 feet. Once airborne, the cameras on board can detect a single person in a diameter up to three miles. It can also detect groups of people and vehicles in a range of five miles.

The Ohio Department of Transportation is volunteering its time to operate the balloon, but the Pennsylvania State Police is paying for the helium, according to the spokeswoman. The state police did not provide an amount per day spent on the balloon or a comparison to the price of using a helicopter in the search, but did report that the cost “is substantially less.”

Authorities launch the balloon in Henryville, Pennsylvania, as a part of their search for Eric Frein. (Credit: Pennsylvania State Police)

“At times the balloon’s observation can be in lieu of helicopters; however, the balloon was not intended to replace the helicopters, it is in addition to them,” Devens said.

The balloon will be flown at the Alpine Mountain Ski & Ride Center in Henryville, Pennsylvania, nearly six miles from Frein’s hometown of Canadensis, Pennsylvania, where a lot of the search has already occurred. The flight location is also just over 11 miles from the Pocono Mountains Municipal Airport. According to WNEP, a local news station in northeastern Pennsylvania, the balloon’s presence near the Paradise and Price Township line coincide with where leads and tips about Frein’s location direct them.

On Sept. 12, Frein allegedly shot and killed Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Cpl. Bryon Dickson and wounded Trooper Alex Douglass at the Blooming Grove Barracks in Pike County. Frein was identified as the only suspect three days later, and has been on the run ever since. On Sept. 18, the FBI added Frein to their Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, bringing the reward for information leading to his arrest up to $175,000.

All together, Frein is charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, criminal homicide, criminal attempt to commit homicide in the first degree, criminal homicide of a law enforcement officer and criminal attempt to commit criminal homicide of a law enforcement officer.

According to the Pennsylvania State Police, no other unmanned aircraft systems have been used in the search. Devens declined to comment on other technology being used in the search.

The Frein case is not the first time in recent memory that authorities have used UAS in a search. In September, authorities used rotocraft drones to look for a missing woman in Texas.

CIO on GPO’s IT model: ‘Best of both worlds’

The Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C. (Credit: GPO)

As a legislative agency, the Government Printing Office is not subject to the information technology mandates sent down by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t follow the executive branch’s trends, GPO’s Chief Information Officer Chuck Riddle told FedScoop in a phone interview

“We try to follow those things where we can because they’re mandated in the executive branch because they’re the best practices,” Riddle said. “We’d like to do those things as well wherever we can.”

Riddle, who comes from an executive branch background as the former chief technology officer and associate chief information officer at the Agriculture Department, said he wasn’t ready for what working at a legislative agency would be like.

“When I first came [to GPO], I don’t think I completely understood what it meant to be a legislative branch agency. I came from the executive branch, and when I found out that legislative branches aren’t required to do some of those things that OMB mandates, I figured that was the best of both worlds,” Riddle said. “You’re not given these unfunded mandates and told you have to do it. You get to sort of cherry pick and then you just go forth and conquer.”

One of those initiatives comes from a 2010 OMB memorandum from then-federal CIO Vivek Kundra to consolidate federal agency data centers to reduce costs of hardware and to cut down on environmental impact. Riddle said GPO would follow suit.

Chuck Riddle, CIO, GPO

“We’re going from three data centers down to two, and at the same time, virtualizing the data center environment, as a lot of places are, so we can shrink the physical footprint of our servers and not have to have so many physical servers and get by with smaller footprints,” Riddle said. “Over time, once we do that, the electricity consumption, the cooling, all of those things become less of an issue and less of a cost.”

However, even though GPO can follow the example of the executive branch, that doesn’t mean it is always an easy sell.

“The challenge is that if you don’t have the mandate, sometimes it’s really tough to get things done,” Riddle said. “It does make it more challenging for CIOs [in the legislative branch] to stay on top of those things without having the heavy hand to motivate agencies like they have on the executive branch.”

The lack of a heavy-handed mandate can make change and innovation difficult for agencies like GPO, which for decades had been focused on a physical print product until moving the majority of its operations to the digital sphere in recent years.

In addition to publishing printed copies of the congressional record and the president’s budget, GPO also provides digital access to its materials through apps and its website. (Credit: GPO)

“With anything, [data center consolidation] is a change, so you’ve got to make sure that you’re slow and methodical about it, but I think we’re making progress on that,” Riddle said. “It’s an art, not a science, as I see it. Sure, you’d love to modernize everything and be done with it, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the right approach either.”

Riddle is no stranger to change — earlier this month, the agency announced it was in the process of migrating its email to a cloud-based system. Although the agency was not the first one governmentwide to embrace cloud-based email, it was the first legislative agency to do so.

The migration is going well, Riddle said. The agency is on track to have all of its systems migrated by the end of the year.

“We’re methodically moving people to the cloud,” Riddle said. “We just do it in a very methodical, structured way so we don’t disrupt anything as we go, because people get very used to how they’ve always done it, so you want to make sure that as you’re moving folks that you’re phasing it in slowly so that they understand it and that they can become champions to the next people who are coming into the cloud.”

According to Riddle, bringing change and helping change occur permeate a lot of what the CIO role is, in addition to the financial end of the job.

“As a CIO, I’m really supposed to be a change agent, and I try to act in that capacity,” Riddle said. “It’s really just trying to do more with less, I guess. We’re not a huge agency, but I think we produce some pretty interesting things with the technologies that we do have. You can’t be, as a CIO of an agency, introducing technology that’s three or four years old. It’s a balancing act, I think.”

It was unclear if other legislative agencies were following the executive branch’s model. FedScoop reached out to the Government Accountability Office and the Library of Congress, but did not receive a comment before publication time. Lisa Hoppis, the CIO of the Congressional Research Service, declined to comment.

Avoiding downtime ‘isn’t rocket science,’ says Solarwinds’ LaPoint

Chris LaPoint, vice president of product management at SolarWinds, gets the essence of what runs through IT practitioners’ heads when they need to fix a problem on their network: It was working yesterday. It’s not working today. What the heck changed?

When dealing with federal agencies, there is often a lot to unpack with that line of thinking. Thin staffing, limited budgets and lack of full network knowledge can often cause a boatload of related headaches. LaPoint said it doesn’t have to be this way, and he recently offered FedScoop some advice government IT professionals can use when avoiding network downtime in the future.

A Gartner study earlier this year measured that by 2015, 80 percent of outages impacting “mission-critical services” will be caused by internal people and processes, with more than 50 percent of those caused internal factors: change, configuration or release integration, and hand-off issues.

Since agencies are often dealing with large networks, LaPoint said it’s crucial for IT professionals to keep damage mitigation systems as simple as possible, breaking down massive changes into manageable chunks for a team to execute.

“It order to detect what changed, I think you have to have a solid backup strategy with a lot of space left in configuration,” LaPoint told FedScoop. “This is not rocket science. But I think what you find within federal government agencies is there are a lot of times where there isn’t a full picture of what their environment looks like.”

To bridge this disconnect, LaPoint said it’s vital that IT operations staff and information security staff communicate as much as possible to take advantage of practices that may already be in use.

“If you look at information security and the importance of automation, IT ops has been doing that sort of work for a long time,” LaPoint said. “They’ve been gathering the same data that info security guys would love to use, but the info security guys end up building their own tools or surviving by asking IT ops on a periodic basis for that data.”

LaPoint said this sort of thinking is creeping into federal agencies but hasn’t completely set in. He points to a recent survey SolarWinds conducted that found IT professionals considered automation and information security two separate focus areas.

“There needs to be some convergence of those two,” LaPoint said. “I think there is an evolution of thinking that needs to happen from the traditional way of looking at information security as a periodic event to continuous monitoring. There are definitely a lot of agencies thinking about this, but there are a lot that aren’t. They are looking at it a separate thing versus looking at how IT ops and information security can really come together to move faster.”

LaPoint understands that introducing new ways of thinking is immensely tough, given all that agency professionals must cope with. However, as technology changes and risks to network downtime grow inside and outside of systems, it’s integral that agencies consider an evolution in their methods.

“It’s no longer a world where you can be a network engineer and just only care about network engineering,” LaPoint said. “You’ve got to understand to blended problem that is IT today.”

GSA common acquisition platform in progress, but no firm timeline set

The General Services Administration’s launch of a common acquisition platform to reduce wasteful practices in government procurement is well into its beta stage, but GSA officials leading the program’s rollout said there’s no grand and official unveiling scheduled.

Kevin Youel Page, GSA’s assistant commissioner for integrated award environment and common acquisition, said Monday at ACT-IAC’s Executive Leadership Conference though his office is currently hard at work developing several layers of the platform, “I don’t have firm timelines for when we’re going to have ubiquitous, end-to-end user experience and contracting.”

Under GSA’s common acquisition platform, procurement officers specializing in, say, cloud computing would act as category managers, helping others who have less experiences in that area. (Credit: iStockphoto.com)

GSA’s common acquisition platform is a move toward a more efficient procurement style based on category management. Instead of asking procurement officers to become subject matter experts on anything their agency needs to buy, this system suggests that, somewhere out there in the government, somebody is an expert at procuring a given item.

Speaking on the panel with Youel Page, Tom Sharpe, GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service commissioner, said a common acquisition platform can relieve some of the stress and difficulty related to tightening budgets, a time when “flat is the new up for funding.”

“Right now, there are 61,000 people working in the federal government doing acquisitions on behalf of federal agencies, and many of them are working in a bubble without knowledge of what their counterparts across the government are doing,” Sharpe said. “They’re very clearly not acting as one. We’re operating like 500 different small businesses suboptimizing the purchasing power of the federal government.” He went on to call it “an incredible waste of human capital and money.”

The solution? “It’s as simple as acting as one,” Sharpe said.

“This is really the federal challenge,” Youel Page said. “How do we get the 61,000 people out there who individually are doing really smart things to provide their view and get them to take advantage of each other’s wisdom?” Somewhere deep in an agency, he said there’s likely someone already doing the exact thing other procurement officers need to get done. “There’s somebody splitting an atom on how to buy cloud services. You just need to find those people who know what they’re doing and bring them into light,” he said.

Those atom-splitters, as Youel Page called them, are vital to the common acquisition platform, and they’ll act as category managers, helping those less experienced with a certain topic navigate and procure it.

But interagency sharing may be easier in theory than in practice. Mary Davie, GSA’s assistant commissioner for integrated technology services, said category management won’t work unless agencies are unbiased or agnostic. Even GSA must be open to the idea that other agencies may have a better acquisition solutions for certain things, and those will be featured on the common acquisition platform as well an offering as well.

So far in its beta, the platform has three “hallways,” what GSA’s calls the different categories, for IT software, IT hardware and office supplies. But over the next year, said Laura Stanton, a director of the common acquisition platform, “what we’re going to be putting in this acquisition platform are a number of other categories; this tool is going to be expanding.”

Still, Stanton said there’s no set time period for the launch, but that’s because they want to do it the right way, she said.

“What you will see is a slow and daily update to the platform,” she said. “So as we find the appropriate pieces and we integrate them in, we’re not going to suddenly pull back the curtain. We want to make sure we do it the right way.”

‘Disturbing’: Federal employee morale, confidence in leadership drops

OPM released the results of its annual federal workforce survey. (Credit: iStockphoto.com)

In a year plagued by the hangover from sequestration and the government shutdown, the 2014 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey shows that federal workforce morale isn’t getting any better, and negative feelings for senior leadership might be the lead culprit as it has dropped to a five-year low.

Each year, the Office of Personnel Management conducts the survey, questioning hundreds of thousands of federal employees on their perception of engagement, motivation, satisfaction, support and other topics surrounding their employment. While OPM was quick to point out that 90 percent of federal employees are hard workers “willing to put in the extra effort to get a job done,” that’s overshadowed by continued downward slide in feds being happy and engaged in their jobs.

Looking at year-over-year change in the federal workforce’s perception on topics like sense of purpose, belief in leadership, and having feelings of motivation and competency, the annual OPM survey results reveal that governmentwide employee engagement sank by a percentage point, dropping from 64 percent in 2013. That number has steadily dropped since 2011, when it reached 67 percent, the highest in the last five years.

The overall employee engagement score is a composite of the nearly 400,000 respondents across 82 agencies, OPM Director Katherine Archuleta explained in a conference call, and digging deeper reveals what might be causing that downward trend. One of the biggest decreases in engagement: Employees’ views on leadership saw a 3 percent plunge since 2013 and 6 percent when compared to 2011.

When broken down even more to the overall responses to individual questions, the trends are even more negative. All of the individual questions on leadership saw decreases in positive responses since last year.

The statement “In my organization, senior leaders generate high levels of motivation and commitment in the workforce” garnered just a 38 percent positive response, a 7 percent drop since 2011.

The Partnership for Public Service gets a good sense of OPM’s FEVS data each year when it uses it to form its “Best Places to Work in Federal Government” rankings. John Palguta, vice president of policy at PPS, said since 2010, he’s seen nasty downward trend in engagement while putting the list together.

“As I thumbed through [this year’s survey], I just see way too many downward pointing arrows in terms of the trend analysis,” Palguta said. “There’s a few little bright spots, but overall these results are disturbing. There’s no way to whitewash it.” He was particularly surprised that leadership was so low, given that a major problem at one agency or a few would be evened out governmentwide. But drop of more than 1 percent, he said, is pretty startling.

“While leaders across the government would like to see these scores go up, we have to remember that this has been a very difficult time for federal employees, and it’s going to take time for them to recover from an extended period of sequestration, furloughs and the government shutdown,” Archuleta said. “The FEVS is valuable because it shows us as leaders where we need to focus those recovery efforts.”

Palguta agrees with the director, saying that the traumatic events of the shutdown last fall still lingered when the survey went out, and respondents looked to leadership to be held accountable.

“I think some of that is misplaced unhappiness, maybe more a result of the political process than the leadership,” he said. “But still, you hold your leaders accountable.”

Archuleta and OPM think agencies can use the data from this survey, along with powerful digital tools like UnlockTalent.gov, to improve upon where the survey shows they are lacking. “We believe this survey is one of the most valuable tools OPM provides to agencies because it helps agency leaders know and understand with their employees, even at the department and office level,” she said. “It helps them make strategic decisions about their workforce initiatives.”

Participants tend to disagree. Only 38 percent “believe the results of this survey will be used to make my agency a better place to work.”

Paul Wilson, vice president of federal solutions for the Ken Blanchard Companies, said, again, it comes down to a lack of leadership accountability that causes that distrust.

“There’s a lack in confidence that things will be done,” Wilson said. “A lot of times what leaders are going to be doing to solve these things are either not done at all or budgets are cut and they’re not implemented. It’s a difference between saying things are going to be done and then actually doing them. The survey happens year after year, but internally, they know that those developmental areas are not changing.”

Despite the poor results, the opportunity to turn things around has just begun. Palguta said the survey isn’t some magic book full of answers; rather, he said, “it tells you the questions to ask,” like why employees feel that way and what can be done about it. “The value of this is not to shake our heads about things going the wrong,” he said. “It’s figuring out how do we take this information and turn things around.”

It’s also not impossible for agencies to succeed in engaging their employees in the current federal landscape of pay cuts, furloughs and political gridlock.

“NASA is an agency that’s been battered in many ways,” Palguta said. “They don’t have a space program right now, they can’t put anybody in space. You would think NASA would be in disarray in terms of employee satisfaction, yet it continues to go up.” At 77 percent, NASA scored the highest for department and large agency employee engagement and global satisfaction, as well as several other minor categories.

Likewise, the fact that so many federal employees continue to take an anonymous survey despite whether they believe it does any good is an encouraging sign.

“The fact that you still have almost half of employees taking the time to respond means there’s at least still some hope that somebody’s paying attention and somebody’s going to do something with the views they’re sharing,” Palguta said.

View the FEVS survey here.

Suburban D.C. schools receive STEM education grant

Several suburban Washington, D.C., schools are slated to receive $1 million from a local chapter of a defense industry nonprofit group to support science, technology, engineering and mathematics education programs.

Middle school students participate in the University of Maryland at College Park’s Computer Science Connect program, one of the grant recipients. (Photo courtesy of UMD)

The program, sponsored by AFCEA Bethesda in Maryland, aims to identify children — particularly girls and minorities — who have an early interest in STEM and help guide them from grade school through college.

The four institutions selected serve students from a range of age levels: One is a private grade school, and another is a Big Ten university. The schools agreed to collaborate to make sure their curricula feeds into the next institution and that they work to share resources that could be helpful to their students.

The program “creates the glue to not get lost along the way,” said Michael Priddy, former vice president of education at AFCEA Bethesda and current president and CEO of Intervise.

As the four schools are located so close to the nation’s capital, the program also has the potential to touch the federal workforce, where there have been recent efforts to bolster recruitment of STEM workers.

For example, Montgomery College, a community college in Maryland selected to receive a grant, has a large number of students from the federal sector and private industry looking to upgrade their skills, said Rose Garvin-Aquilino, the school’s director of corporate and foundation relations. Also, the school’s mentor-mentee day brings in some professionals who work in government, so that career track is particularly visible.

Sanjay Rai, senior vice president for academic affairs at Montgomery College, said, overall, the need for a STEM-trained worker is much higher today than it was several years ago, and community colleges are in a unique position to fill that need.

“Community colleges are accessible – geographically and financially,” Rai said.

Garvin-Aquilino said Montgomery College’s ongoing relationship with AFCEA Bethesda has already benefited its students. So far, 68 students have received scholarships, she said. And recently, one of its students was able to nab an informational interview with the company of one of AFCEA Bethesda’s top brass.

“It’s that opportunity that’s really powerful,” Rose said.

Over the next five years, through the grant program:

• Bullis School, an independent primary and high school in Potomac, Maryland, will receive $75,000 for an initiative to investigate how best to reinforce interest in STEM careers for girls from grade school through college.
• Montgomery College Foundation will receive $225,000 for student scholarships as well as for a STEM engagement workshop for middle school girls, called the Sonya Kovalevsky Program.
• The University of Maryland at College Park will receive $425,000 in support of the AFCEA Bethesda Scholarship Program and Computer Science Connect – a three-year outreach initiative that encourages young women and racial minorities to explore computer science.
• The Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville, Maryland, and the University System of Maryland Foundation Inc. will receive $100,000 for scholarships.
• AFCEA International Education Foundation will receive $25,000 annual for STEM teacher scholarships.

Air Force ready for branch’s first-ever hackathon

Lt. Col. Matthew Yaun conducts aerial operations during a training flight onboard a C-17 Globemaster III Sept. 8, near Joint Base Charleston, S.C. The Air Force is holding its first-ever hackathon this weekend at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. (Credit: U.S. Air Force/Flickr)

In the shadow of the Air Force Research Laboratory, more than 100 students, academics and civic hackers will spend their weekend applying code to some of the Air Force’s most pressing problems during the military branch’s first-ever hackathon.

Coders with a variety of backgrounds from schools like Stanford University, Rutgers University and the University of Dayton will be joining representatives of AFRL, the Air Force Institute of Technology and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, for the two-day event.

Dave Caraway, the co-founder of Code For Dayton, a Code For America offshoot, helped organize the hackathon, called “LabHack,” in order to “bring in expertise and uncover new skill sets” that could help advance current Air Force research.

“A big part of it is learning about the Air Force and the problems they’re working on, which have a lot of impact in other areas of society,” Caraway told FedScoop.

After the event sold out in a week and a half, Caraway expanded the hackathon to include a mini-conference. The event will also feature presentations from OpenBCI, a company that builds open source chip kits that are used to measure electrical brain activity, and Plotly, an online analytics and data visualization company.

The code being built will actually focus on a number of different issues highlighted by Air Force researchers. A key component will focus on 15 GB worth of data collected from sensors from the AFRL’s 711th Human Performance Wing, which is based at Wright-Patterson.

The hackathon will take place at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, home of the Air Force Research Laboratory. (Credit: soundfromwayout/Flickr)

“We wanted to join forces and challenge people to create innovative ways to solve Air Force problems through analyzing human-centered research,” Scott Galster, AFRL’s chief of the Applied Neuroscience Branch, said in a release. “Using a ‘hackathon’ as our platform allowed us to bring the community together in a fun and competitive way while supporting our airmen.”

However, Caraway said the projects can come from a number of different problem sets.

“We’re not trying to be heavy handed about what people work on,” Caraway said. “From the Air Force perspective, it is about pitching the idea. The idea is to motivate the attendees to care about that problem and then start to approach it and build solutions for it.”

The code from this weekend’s hackathon will all be available through a public general license and will uploaded to the event’s GitHub page.

“The code will be carried forward afterwards,” Caraway said. “It could be put into commercial products, it could be used for future hackathons, it could go into further development for some of the problems that the defense community is working on as well.”

Caraway, a former Presidential Innovation Fellow who works for GSA’s 18F, said the real success of the event goes beyond the code.

“This might be the first opportunity [for attendees] to ever work directly with government folks,” Caraway said. “Likewise, for a lot of the government folks, this may be the first time they’ve met with these companies or universities.”

For more information, visit LabHack’s website.

Health IT national coordinator leaves to battle Ebola

Karen DeSalvo is stepping down from her role as the national coordinator for health IT to take over as acting assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services.

HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell asked DeSalvo to take on the assistant secretary position and aid her in this time of crisis fighting Ebola, according to a spokesman at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. DeSalvo, who joined ONC as national coordinator in January after a stint as the health commissioner for the city of New Orleans, will assume her new position immediately.

“Dr. DeSalvo has deep roots and a belief in public health and its critical value in assuring the health of everyone, not only in crisis, but every day,” the ONC spokesperson said.

Lisa Lewis, ONC’s chief operating officer, will step in as acting national coordinator.

DeSalvo will be the acting assistant secretary for health, but it is unclear if she will be officially nominated for Senate confirmation. After joining HHS, DeSalvo will remain in an advisory role to Lewis and the ONC team when she moves to HHS, the spokesperson said.

Simultaneously, ONC Deputy National Coordinator Jacob Reider announced he will depart the office in November. In an email to ONC staff obtained by FedScoop, Reider said he made the decision with his family, who live in New York where he’s been commuting to and from weekly.

“Karen and I worked closely on the timing of both this announcement and my departure so that there would be a good transition, strong clinical leadership at ONC, and continued ONC strength on the issues that remain so important to me: decision support, quality improvement, health IT safety and of course usability,” he wrote in the email. “In light of the events that led to Karen’s announcement today – it’s appropriate now to be clear about my plans as well. With Jon White and Andy Gettinger on-board, and a search for a new Deputy National Coordinator well underway, I am pleased that much of this has now fallen into place – with only a few loose ends yet to be completed.”

The ONC, charged for the last decade with driving forward the nation’s health IT efforts, is facing a critical reshuffling. In addition to losing DeSalvo and Reider, the office also recently announced the departures of Judy Murphy, chief nursing officer and director of the Office of Clinical Quality and Safety, to IBM Healthcare Global Business Services and Doug Fridsma, chief scientist.

Amid criticism, regulators grant USPS grocery delivery permission

The United States Postal Service can now officially start delivering groceries to your door, according to an order authorizing customized delivery from the Postal Regulatory Commission.

At the end of September, USPS filed a notice with the commission announcing its intent to continue an initial product test of grocery delivery that began several months ago in the San Francisco area in cooperation with Amazon.com Inc. One day before the newest test was scheduled to start, PRC issued its notice of authorization.

In addition to requesting permission to begin offering the grocery delivery service, USPS also applied for an exemption from a $10 million adjusted limitation, which would allow the independent agency to exceed the $10 million revenue cap established for market test products. The PRC, however, denied the USPS’ request to exceed $10 million in revenue “due to the lack of financial data to estimate revenues for customized delivery,” the order said. USPS may later resubmit the request to exceed the $10 million if it can prove that an exemption is necessary through sufficient data and calculations of estimated total revenue anticipated for each fiscal year of the test.

The Taxpayers Protection Alliance, however, reported to the PRC that the test should not move forward. In the comments filed with the commission, the alliance said the post office has a record of taking advantage of the rights and privileges it receives as a government agency and using them to “undercut the market in which they operate.”

“Inserting themselves into this industry space would simply be another way for the USPS to expand their reach without instituting real reform, not to fulfill its mandate of delivering the mail on time to its customers anywhere in the country,” David Williams, the president of the alliance, said. “The growth would work to push out already established private providers. This action works to hurt private businesses who cannot afford to bring their price down to a level where they can be competitive.”

Williams also pointed to the financial shortfalls the Postal Service has faced over the past few years and called the agency, which receives no taxpayer funding, “near a point of financial collapse.”

“A government agency should not be working to compete with American businesses,” Williams said. “The USPS needs to definitively show that the previous 60-day test of grocery delivery services was successful and that the USPS did not lose money on this project.”

The PRC’s public representative, who represents the general public, filed comments with the commission in support of the USPS’ proposal to conduct the market test but did report the “current record is inadequate for the commission to evaluate market disruption.”

In its order granting the USPS permission to conduct the grocery delivery test, the PRC said the new initiative would not cause market disruption because the prices offered by competitors are within the range of what USPS will charge.

The public representative — in this case Anne Siarnacki — also urged the commission to monitor any changes to the test and to expand the amount of data collected during the process. Additionally, the public representative recommended that the commission deny the $10 million exemption.

The PRC, in response to the notion that USPS could expand the grocery delivery service beyond the San Francisco area, required the Postal Service to provide advance notice to the commission if it intends to move the test to other geographical areas.

Instead of the original USPS data collection plan — which was set to report the volume of packages delivered, the work hours, the travel times, the total cost data and the total revenue generated — the PRC requested the USPS report volumes and revenues by fiscal quarter and attributable costs incurred during the test.

According to the PRC, the test will begin Friday, or shortly after, and will run for two years unless USPS requests an extension, requests that the product be offered permanently or ends the test early.

Veterans get look at emerging VA telehealth system

The Department of Veterans Affairs provided representatives of some of the nation’s leading veterans service organizations Thursday with a demonstration of the agency’s emerging telehealth system and clinical video telehealth scheduling software, both of which are designed to improve access to VA health services for veterans.

VA’s telehealth programs remain among the largest and most comprehensive in the nation, with more than 690,000 veterans taking part in more than 2 million virtual appointments during fiscal year 2014.

“Today’s demonstration is an important part of our ongoing conversation with our [veterans service organizations] partners in developing the tools that ensure veterans have access to the quality care and services they have earned,” VA Secretary Robert McDonald said. “Telehealth is rapidly becoming an attractive option, especially for veterans who do not have a VA health care facility close to home.”

Bill Rausch, political director for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America — one of the largest post-9/11 veterans organizations, with more than 300,000 members — was present for the demo at the Washington, D.C., VA Medical Center. “I think what they showed us today is the type of 21st century service that our generation expects from the VA or from any health care organization,” Rausch said in a telephone interview with FedScoop.

According to Rausch, VA officials presented impressive adoption rates for telehealth services, claiming at least 717,040 veterans had taken advantage of the new technology during the last fiscal year. VA officials said that is a 12.6 percent improvement over the previous year and 45 percent of those who were able to access VA health care services using the telehealth system lived in a rural area where it was difficult to get to a VA medical center. Rausch said he is also optimistic about VA’s plans to use the technology for a broader range of counseling services, including post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues.

VA received a $23 million funding increase for telehealth programs in the fiscal year 2015 budget, bringing the agency’s total investment in telehealth to $567 million for the year. VA also is using funding from the $16.3 billion VA reform bill signed in August to build additional clinics, many of which are offering new telehealth options. The clinics will allow veterans to access medical expertise from specialists who might be located at hospitals hundreds of miles away. Known as Asynchronous, or Store-and-Forward Telehealth, the concept involves acquiring medical data (like medical images, vital signs and voice recordings) and then transmitting the data to a doctor or medical specialist at a convenient time for assessment offline.

The demonstration Thursday also featured a presentation on VA’s new clinical video telehealth scheduling software, which is designed to improve VA’s efficiency in scheduling patients for telehealth consultations. The software was deployed last month and VA schedulers have been training on the new system, according to VA.