HHS tools, data unleashed as part of Health Datapalooza IV

The Health and Human Services Department unveiled new data and new opportunities for researchers and developers as part of Health Datapalooza IV held at the Omni Shoreham in Washington, D.C.

“A more data-driven and transparent health care marketplace can help consumers and their families make important decisions about their care,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “The administration is committed to making the health system more transparent and harnessing data to empower consumers.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released county-level data on Medicare spending and use for the first time along with selected data on hospital outpatient charges. CMS also released a data set on Medicare beneficiaries with chronic conditions, which along with the county-level data set, will aim to help researchers, data innovators and the public better understand Medicare spending and service use to spur innovation.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology released additional information on the adoption of specific electronic health record systems. Additionally, HHS is co-sponsoring a national competition called “code-a-palooza” to design an app using Medicare data primary-care providers can use to help manage patient care. The winner of the contest will get $25,000.

In addition, ONC, in coordination with the Health Resources and Services Administration, selected the winners of the Apps4TotsHealth Challenge, which was launched to help parents and caregivers of young children better manage their nutrition and physical activity. ONC also announced today the launch of the Blue Button Co-Design Challenge, developed to spur the creation of new applications to allow patients to better use their own health data to improve their own care.

Baby blog: what my dog taught me about fatherhood

There’s a scene from “Scrubs” where two of the characters, Turk and his partner Carla, are talking about having a baby, but Turk is a little bit more than nervous so Carla tries to ease his fears about life as a father.

“It’s like having a dog that slowly learns how to talk,” Carla says, to which Turk responds, as most dudes would, by saying, “Awesome!”

As the parent of both a 1-month-old daughter named Samantha and a 3-year-old brindle and white pup named James, I found the exchange particularly funny, but perhaps a little misleading.

Through my vast experience — all 32 days of being a parent — puppies are more like a rambunctious toddler after a breakfast of Pixie Sticks and Mountain Dew. They are a bundle of energy in need of constant supervision, so they don’t, you know, chew up a $60 video game disc when you turn away. Not that that happened or anything.

Babies are a little more relaxed. Their movements are limited, but they need more attention and nurturing (along with feeding and changing) — it’s more of a 24-hour vigil of constant care as opposed to the dog that needed a brisk walk and a pre-approved item to chew on before passing out for the night.

With that said, though, having James taught me lessons I’m finding valuable now with Samantha as he was the first creature I took onto myself to be responsible for — my parenting training wheels, if you will, along with my best furry friend.

Here are some things having a dog prepared me for:

Communication

As someone who gets his paycheck from writing, most of my day is actually dealing with nonverbal communication, something James got me used to as the only words I think he knows are “walk,” “dog park” and “cheese.”

When he wants a drink, he paws at his bowl. When he wants to go outside, he paws at the door. When he wants a toy, he nudges his nose against his toy chest. It’s amazing how he’s learned to tell me what he wants, and I’m able to respond.

Samantha is not that quite advanced yet, as her communication is basically crying until I figure out exactly what she wants, similar to how it took awhile to figure out James’ needs. Does she need to be changed? Does she want a snack? How about a diaper change? All things I have to figure out on the fly.

Patience

I love my children, both dog and human, but there is a patience aspect I’ve had to — and continue to — learn about. For example, when James was a puppy he chewed up my $80 laptop cord. I was mad, but dealt with it and ran to Best Buy to get a new one.

Upon getting home, I plugged in the new cord until a few minutes later when I saw my battery light go on. It took only a moment, but James chewed the new cord, destroying it before I threw away the box. Despite my pleas, Best Buy wouldn’t let me trade it in, so I blew $160 bucks in about an hour because of my little buddy.

Honestly, though, it was hard to be too mad because he was just doing what nature instructed him. Instead of getting mad at him, I learned to be smarter with my stuff and watch him more closely. Thinking about it calmly made me realize it was probably more my fault than his.

I think about that in the middle of Samantha’s crying fits when nothing in the world will subdue her, even if they come at 3 a.m. She’s crying because she needs or wants something and has no other way to communicate. There is no use getting mad or stressed, but instead dealing with the situation and trying to keep a cool head.

Love

It may sound strange, but James helped teach me about love. When you’re growing up, of course you love your family and your friends. As you grow older, perhaps you love another person as I do with my wife, but those are things that come naturally.

When you become a parent, you love your children, but there is also an aspect of responsibility not tied into the other aspects. For the love you give them, both children and pets return it as well (except cats, they are evil, selfish creatures), which makes the whole experience worthwhile.

One of my favorite parts each day is when I come home from work and open the door and James runs down the stairs to meet me, his tail wagging frantically. He lets me know I was missed and I’m sure if Samantha could walk, she would join him too. Some day soon she will be, standing next to James ready to welcome her dad home with a hug.

I can already see it now, and I’m sure it will be — as Turk said — “Awesome!”

FedOSS: Drupal and government

FedScoop’s Luke Fretwell and Red Hat U.S. Public Sector Chief Technology Strategist Gunnar Hellekson discuss the latest in federal government open source software. (Archive · RSS)

This episode

Phase2 CEO and co-founder Jeff Walpole and Government Practice Director Greg Wilson discuss government Drupal adoption, implementation successes, state and local uses, the government-specific OpenPublic Drupal distribution and more.

Common goal unites agencies, civic hackers

Hack for Change is jokingly referred to as “the biggest intergovernmental collaboration since World War II.”

The truth is, the magnitude and turnout of the inaugural event surprised everyone involved. More than 11,000 people and 21 federal agencies participated in the 97 events that made up the Hack for Change weekend, in celebration of National Hacking Day on June 1.

Events took the form of hackathons, brigade meet-ups, and block parties. In California, Palo Alto hosted a civic hacking block party, occupying a whole section of the neighborhood to accommodate the 5,000 attendees. The atmosphere of the events also differed; the White House hackathon welcomed individuals in suits and ties, while the Affinity Lab on U Street was teaming with Red Bull-slugging, pizza box-toting hackers.

For those who don’t know what the average hackathon consists of, here is a brief explanation. The hackers are presented with a challenge and work together to find solutions using the open data provided to them. In the case of Hack for Change, the challenges were presented by federal agencies, each with a different challenge specific to their organization.

“The real objective is not only to see how communities actually work with federal data sets and federal agencies, but also to see how they connect on a local level with their local officials and increase their participation,” said Neisan Massarrat, Core Team at SecondMuse. “It’s all about improving civic engagement.”

SecondMuse, an innovation and collaboration agency and operational partner of the Hack for Change event, teamed with organizations such as Random Hacks of Kindness and Code for America to get the ball rolling and organize the event.

The nation’s capital hosted three different events: a hackathon held at Google that focused on hyper-local D.C.-area challenges; Affinity Labs on U Street worked on state and federal government challenges; and the White House worked specifically on its “We the People” platform.

Challenges included the Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Safety Challenge Response, which worked to create a database to organize water-safety violations and how to contact those in violation, and also the Labor Department’s efforts to connect women veterans with resources available to them related to child care, post-traumatic stress disorder and transportation support.

“What you build in a weekend might not save a life; the difference isn’t night and day,” said Todd Khozein, a partner at SecondMuse. “But for us, it really catalyzes our imagination. You see your ideas come into fruition — it’s a proof of concept.”

And for event organizers, that is really what Hack for Change is about: giving citizens a way to engage in their government and create solutions.

“We changed the dynamics of citizen engagement, collaboration and partnerships using technology to solve domestic challenges in an unprecedented way,” said Deborah Diaz, deputy CIO at NASA. “This massive collaboration movement involving federal, state and local government truly connected with all types of interested consumers, experts, youth, coders and interested citizens who want to voluntarily contribute and make a difference.”

The work Nicholas Skytland, program manager of NASA’s Open Innovation Program, has done with NASA and civic hacker collaboration is credited with starting this national conversation, as well as serving as a catalyst for the Hack for Change event.

“Citizens are crying out for the government to do something with open data, and we need to find ways to incentivize them to get involved and work on solutions,” he said. “A lot of people think that you have to move to the coast or to a big city to have opportunities. And one of our main objectives for Hack for Change was to identify those small-town areas and make them just as viable, and give them local solutions they can implement.”

Implementation of solutions is, of course, one of the most important goals of this event. On July 23, the White House will be hosting Champions of Change, where solutions created during Hack for Change are presented.

“The point of this is to connect the people who feel invested in these challenges and have an interest in them and the potential to invest,” Massarrat said. “And also, creating coordination across the spectrum in terms of aligning projects to resources that people give to us.”

Another goal Hack for Change organizers have is to increase understanding of what civic hacking is, and to get away from the negative connotation that seems to follow it.

“A hacker is someone who uses a minimum of resources and a maximum of brainpower to fix or tweak something,” Khozein said. “They’re creators.”

To learn more about the work done at Hack for Change and future events, check out HackforChange.org.

Cybercriminals go old school in 2013

After three straight quarters of increasing growth rates for malware and suspicious web addresses, cybercriminals reverted to tried and true methods of cyberattacks — spam, phishing, etc. — in the first quarter of 2013, according a McAfee’s quarterly report on cyber threats released Monday.

“Those old tools, they’re effective. Spam works,” said Brent Conran, McAfee’s chief security officer, after a press conference announcing the findings. In Q1, McAfee found the first increase in global spam volume in more than three years; it nearly doubled. “As we take down botnets and create more and more controls, the bad guys have to replace them,” Conran said.

While the total number of malware samples McAfee found still increased in Q1 — up to 128 million — the growth rate slowed to 28 percent, down from 38 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. Similarly, the overall amount of Android mobile malware samples and suspicious web addresses grew, but at a slower rate than during Q4 of last year.

According to the report, the lagging growth rate represents a cybercriminal community “becoming smarter and more disciplined as it develops a preference for targeted attacks.” The report called the trend, “a new and more dangerous direction.”

“This is seen as part of a much more global interlocked ecosystem,” said Phyllis Schneck, McAfee’s public sector chief technology officer. “Every part of one network is communicating with another part of a network.”

To replace thwarted cyberattacks, cybercriminals are going where the people are: social media. And they’re increasingly using “spray and pray” spamming techniques, as Conran put it. In the first quarter, the presence of Koobface — a computer worm targeting social media users — tripled, after remaining flat through most of 2012.

According to a Nielsen report released in December, total time spent on social media sites overall in the United States increased 37 percent between July 2011 and July 2012. As of December, 17 percent of all time spent online via personal computer in the United States was spent on Facebook.

“You see an increase in hacking social media because people are there,” Conran said.

While the growth rate of mobile malware samples slowed in Q1, mobile malware is still “exploding,” Conran said. From almost nothing 18 months ago, total Android mobile malware samples nearly topped 50,000 in 2013’s first quarter, a 40 percent increase from 2012’s last quarter.

For now, the vast majority of mobile malware is focused on the Android market because it has the biggest footprint in the global market. The Android’s open platform (compared to Apple’s closed platform) also plays a role, Schneck said.

The open platform is “a lot more inviting and probably less expensive and risky to create something if you’re an adversary team,” she said. “The Mac side of the world has some vetting for their apps. Will that level off? Probably.”

Mobile and social are not the only new points of entrance for cyberattacks, the report emphasized. Public and private organizations need a “layered approach” to truly fend off new attacks before they enter the organization’s infrastructure. But, as Conran said, hacking is “going to go to places you’ve never imagined.”

HHS establishes CISO council

When Kevin Charest last October became chief information security officer at the Health and Human Services Department, his first order of business was to tackle governance.

With a highly federated model featuring operating divisions spread throughout the country, Charest wanted the department’s CISOs to be able to speak with one voice, along with sharing best practices and lessons learned.

To fix that, Charest instituted a departmentwide CISO council that — unlike the working group that preceded it — features its own formal charter, voting rules and standards. It’s also been able to attract the CISOs from each operating division instead of executives a little lower on the CISO food chain like the working group.

Charest said the council has been in place since January and focuses on broad-based initiatives where there is a security component.

“Before the council, we basically had a loose group of people talking to each other but not able to speak with one collective voice,” Charest said. “Now, we’re all able to get on the same page as a department, and that gives us a better way to speak with the departments’ CTOs and CIOs as well.”

Charest said he’d like to see the federal government do the same thing. He said department CISOs are already getting together across agencies to discuss information security concepts of operation and challenges such as continuous monitoring.

“The reality is, no one is in a vacuum and we can’t just rely on DHS or one entity to handle the government’s larger security problems,” Charest said.

As for his priorities, Charest said they fall in line with department Chief Information Officer Frank Baitman, who is looking to create a certain technology baseline for the department.

Charest said he’s doing that in the security space and wants each part of HHS to be at a certain minimum security level and then ultimately, bring that level up across the department

“Some components have a robust information security program, some do not, and still others are in the middle,” he said. “There’s been no baseline, but instead the individual program’s success has been dependent upon those CISOs who were better at getting resources than perhaps some of the others. The squeaky wheel was getting the grease, but the problem is everyone needs the grease.”

Charest made the point to the operating divisions that he believed a significant percentage of the cyberinfrastructure could be commoditized. The rest, he said, depended on the individual division’s mission.

The key, he said, is coming to an agreement on what comprises that percentage to better facilitate activities such as dashboarding, trending and simply understanding the cyberenvironment.

As for priorities, Charest said one of his biggest is securing the cloud and the department has been one of the earliest players in the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program.

Charest said just last week, HHS completed an agency-sponsored third-party authorization for Amazon Web Services in what he believes is the first in the federal government. That will allow other federal agencies to use the same model HHS, working with FedRAMP, developed and help them get to the cloud quicker.

“We’re trying to break new ground,” Charest said, “but the biggest part is that every part of HHS was on board. They’ve all got skin in the game, so instead of this being a mandate from the department HQ office, this is something they’ve all already bought into and that’s a huge key.”

5 must-read stories of the week

FedScoop rounds up the top 5 must-reads of the past week.

Will the 113th Congress succeed on cybersecurity where the 112th failed?

Big data as modern-day philanthropy

White House to propose legislation limiting contractor reimbursement

Twitter: Officials’ rise or ruin?

Ex-EPA administrator joins Apple

FedPod: Caps on contractors reimbursement

The White House is looking to put a cap on the amount contractors can get reimbursed for certain expenses.

DHS’ Robert Palmer on mobility

Robert Palmer, director, information assurance, Department of Homeland Security, discusses federal government mobility in this interview with FedScoopTV.

Excerpt:

Right now, as many folks have pointed out, it’s all about mobility. The role that I play right now is the security managers at many of the enterprise services for DHS. So mobilizing that and securing those services as we move forward is my fulltime job at this point.

McAfee’s Ken Kartsen on foreign cyber adversaries

Ken Kartsen, vice president, federal, McAfee, discusses foreign cyber adversaries in this interview with FedScoopTV.

Excerpt:

I’d say our largest cyber threat is probably our foreign adversaries. If you think about their ability and their want to get into our networks, not just to be able to have some control but to actually our fear of them being able to take control and utilize that control is by far the largest fear. It’s the next war, potentially, whether it’s our critical infrastructure or water supplies or our energy capacity or our classified information systems and our ability to launch a physical way and them being able to stop that. In my opinion, that’s the largest threat. As long as man has been around, there’s been wars; there’s always been commanders and leaders and adversaries on each side. That will continue, unfortunately, for a long time to come.