Recently, our colleagues on Government Technology Insider, shared an invaluable conversation between federal healthcare leaders and technology experts about the costs and consequences of legacy technology on the quality of care and patient experiences for millions of Americans who receive healthcare from agencies. With an unexpected influx of funding in several healthcare programs, including the Rural Healthcare Transformation Program, federal healthcare leaders are finally able to start these modernization efforts. Read on to learn more about the technology drivers of these once-in-a-generation investments.
There’s a quiet revolution happening in the federal health space, and it’s all directed toward improving access to care, delivery, and health outcomes for all Americans. Despite budget cuts affecting several federal healthcare agencies, there has been investment in other agencies and in federal programs to support state governments in expanding access to care, most notably through the Rural Healthcare Transformation Program, administered by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. At the heart of this push to improve healthcare is a recognition that technology is fundamental to the rapid transformation that agency leaders want to see and citizens need.
This technology-driven transformation was the topic of conversation between Fed Gov Today’s Francis Rose, Bruce Caswell, President and CEO of Maximus, Srinivas Panguluri, Acting CIO of the Health Resources and Services Administration, and Barbara Keating, Managing Director of Federal Health at Maximus. Over the course of the conversation, the experts broke down the challenges facing federal healthcare agencies and identified the ways in which technologies can advance agencies’ modernization efforts while delivering measurable impacts.
For Caswell, the cloud is fundamental to a successful healthcare transformation for any agency. It enables not only significant cost savings for agencies but also delivers flexibility to move systems while maintaining continuity of care. Caswell and Rose noted that federal healthcare agencies can’t just stop delivering healthcare to millions of citizens because systems need to be transformed. Modernization and transformation have to occur in real time without interrupting service delivery. “It’s like changing the engine on a plane while it’s flying,” explained Caswell about the intricate process of modernization in healthcare environments.
By moving to the cloud, federal healthcare agencies can mitigate the financial, cybersecurity, and delivery of care burdens brought about by legacy technology and systems. For Caswell, however, while cloud-based modernization enables agencies to make many changes, they need to know where to begin. Centering change on the patient and focusing on how to improve their experience, care, and outcomes is the only way to approach modernization. “I would begin from the citizen standpoint, so we want to be able to enable individuals to use [a portal, a digital front door, or other system] on their terms,” Caswell shared. “We want to be constantly rethinking how people want to use and interact with technology, we need to think about it in generational terms as well … you have to [drive modernization] in a very thoughtful way that meets people where they are.”
That focus on prioritizing patient-centered design in federal healthcare drives the conversation for the rest of this Fed Gov Today episode. In the second half of this episode, Srinivas Panguluri, Acting CIO of the Health Resources and Services Administration, and Barbara Keating, Managing Director of Federal Health at Maximus, discussed the challenges and opportunities that cutting-edge technologies like generative AI bring to healthcare delivery and how they can improve patient care, patient experience, and healthcare outcomes.
The conversation between Panguluri and Keating is far too dynamic to capture in a few short sentences. Our prescription is to use the player above or pop over to FedGov Today and catch their conversation in full.