Part 5 features the Obama Administration's committment to transparency, with Sunshine Week contributions from U.S. Chief Information Office Vivek Kundra at the White House White Board, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius, VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki, an overview of open government investment in federal agencies, and the launch of a new section of WhiteHouse.gov dedicated to good government
White House, March 17, 2011:
White Board: The IT Dashboard & the Value of Transparency
In this White House White Board, U.S. Chief Information Office Vivek Kundra explains how the IT Dashboard website helped save $3 billion in taxpayer funds and make government more efficient by shining a light on the federal government's IT projects.
White House, March 17, 2011:
Sunshine, Savings, and Service
Posted by Vivek Kundra
Ed. Note: This post is part of our Sunshine Week series on the blog. Sunshine Week is a national initiative to celebrate and focus on government transparency and open government.
For too long, the Federal Government has failed to effectively harness the power and potential of information technology (IT) -- despite spending approximately $80 billion dollars on IT each year, and more than $600 billion over the past decade. As a result, it has lagged far behind the private sector in the reaping the gains in productivity and enhancements in service from IT. To get a better return on this investment for the American people, we have fundamentally altered the way we manage the federal government's IT projects -- using transparency to shed light on government operations and to hold government managers accountable for results.
On my first day on the job, at the beginning of the Obama Administration, I was handed a portfolio that included $27 Billion in IT projects that were years behind schedule, and over budget. I quickly found that the sheer size of the portfolio often led to a sense of faceless accountability and quickly set out to fix that. That’s why just months after President Obama took office, we launched the IT Dashboard (June, 2009) – which provides a clear window into Federal IT projects, bolstering transparency and accountability. The IT Dashboard shines a light on these projects, including if they are on schedule and within budget -- and posting the photo and name of the official responsible -- and agencies continue to increase transparency and improve data quality.
White House, March 16, 2011:
Investing in Open Government to Create A More Efficient and Effective Government
Posted by Chris Lu
Ed. Note: This post is part of our Sunshine Week series, a national initiative to celebrate and focus on government transparency and open government.
Federal agencies collect enormous amounts of data about such diverse matters as automobile safety, air travel, air quality, workplace safety, drug safety, nutrition, crime, obesity, the employment market, and health care. The Obama Administration has made it a priority to share this and other government information – what the President has called a “national asset” – to improve citizen education and decision-making, and to spur innovation and job creation.
Federal agencies are working hard to foster open government, and we encourage you to examine what they have done. For example:
•The Department of Homeland Security created “Virtual USA,” enabling public safety officials across all levels of government to share information in real time, and improve response to national disasters.
•The Department of Energy, as part of its efforts to promote clean energy, launched OpenEI.org, containing dozens of clean energy resources and data sets, including maps of worldwide solar and wind potential, information on climate zones, and energy best practices. The Department intends to expand these resources to include on-line training and technical expert networks.
•The Environmental Protection Agency, together with other federal, state, local, and tribal agencies, developed AIRNow.gov, offering the public daily Air Quality Index forecasts and real-time Air Quality Index conditions for over 300 cities across the country as well as links to detailed state and local air quality cites.
•And six federal agencies—the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the EPA—created Recalls.gov, to alert the public to unsafe, hazardous, or defective products and up-to-date consumer safety information.
Throughout the week, WhiteHouse.gov will continue highlighting the Administration’s commitment to open government, including the accomplishments of three other departments – Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, and Transportation. We hope you will take a moment to read these blog posts. What unites these federal agencies is that they all consider open government to be a long-term investment in building a stronger democracy and creating a more efficient and effective government.
White House, March 16, 2011:
Sunshine Week at the Department of Health and Human Services
Posted by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
Ed. Note: This post is part of our Sunshine Week series on the blog. Sunshine Week is a national initiative to celebrate and focus on government transparency and open government.
Few things are as deeply personal as your health or the health of your loved ones, and few decisions deserve as much attention as those we make in our daily lives to protect our health. At HHS, our efforts to make government more open have provided many Americans with health information they can use to be well and realize their potential. We aim to help make our government better, faster, and smarter.
While we have important work yet to be done, Sunshine Week provides an occasion to take stock of the many important projects into which many of our nearly 80,000 employees – working with many of you – have poured their energy and talents over the past year. I invite you to visit our Open Government website, where we warmly welcome your feedback, ideas, and contributions.
This past year, HHS made significant strides promoting a culture of open government. Our accomplishments include, for example:
•Key data sharing initiatives to help all Americans make informed decisions about their health. The Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI) is making vast amounts of useful health-related data easily and publicly available – including community health indicators (e.g., smoking or obesity rates), hospital quality, nursing home quality, and much more. Citizen innovators took this data and quickly developed related applications such as community health maps, tools for finding the best doctors, and powerful new analytical tools for clinical providers, journalists, and community leaders. This is just one example of how Open Government matters – not in the abstract, but in real life. Similar efforts include our National Library of Medicine Application Programming Interface portal, the HHS Health Indicators Warehouse (public website with over 2,000 indicators of national, state, and local health – information never before made public), and a new Health Data community on Data.gov serving as a one-stop shop for downloadable health data.
•Launching tools and applications to foster easy citizen use of health-related data for decision-making. We launched HealthCare.gov, the first website to provide both public and private health coverage options nationwide in a single, easy-to-use tool for consumers, to widespread acclaim. Users can identify coverage options that are right for them, accessing an enormous amount of data that HHS has collected from insurance companies. Consumers can compare health plans head-to-head based on price, benefits, and other key plan statistics. This is a huge step forward for transparency in the insurance market – transparency that increases competition between insurers and creates better value for consumers. Over 3.4 million visitors have accessed the site since the launch, spending an average of ten minutes per visit. Additionally, we launched the award-winning [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Dashboardhttps:/www.cms.gov/Dashboard], allowing the public to easily view and break down Medicare spending on inpatient hospital services. NIH also developed RSS feeds and a related iPhone app to automatically update companies and individuals on licensing and collaborative research opportunities at NIH and the FDA.
•Fostering a culture of Open Government inside HHS to encourage innovation. Our Innovation Council is charged with advancing a culture of innovation and participation across HHS, rewarding and recognizing promising innovations across the agency. To harvest the best ideas for serving Americans from within our agency, employees can nominate and vote on co-worker best ideas. In our first contest, more than 100 teams were nominated, and six innovator teams were acknowledged for their amazing work, including Text4Baby (a mobile health messaging service for mothers and infant health), an innovative new procurement management tracking system, and a new public-private partnership to advance childhood obesity research. More information about the contest can be found at http://www.hhs.gov/open/innovate/index.html.
At HHS, we do not believe that open government is just “one more thing to do.” Rather, it is essential to maximizing the success of health reform implementation, and to keep us all healthy and happy in the long run. We expect continued progress in 2011 and beyond, to further increase the efficiency and effectiveness with which we promote the health and welfare of the American people.
White Houe, March 17, 2011:
Good Government on WhiteHouse.gov
Posted by Kori Schulman
Today, we launched a new section on WhiteHouse.gov that is dedicated to good government. WhiteHouse.gov/GoodGovernment is your central portal to tools and data that connect citizens to their government and improve their everyday lives, as well as Presidential Actions that promote open, transparent and accountable government.
You'll find useful tools and data from across the administration all in one place. Here, you can:
•Browse the names of everyone who visits the White House: Having released over 1,000,000 names to date, the White House provides records of visitors on an ongoing basis online.
•Report suspected incidents of improper spending: PaymentAccuracy.gov gives taxpayers a way to join the fight against improper spending by reporting suspected incidents of fraud, waste, and abuse.
•See what’s on the President’s and Vice President’s calendar: Check out the President’s and Vice President’s daily public schedules, subscribe to updates, and even add their events to your own calendar.
•Review each agency’s Open Government Plan: Following the President’s Open Government Directive, agencies implemented ambitious Open Government Plans, utilizing new technologies to connect citizens to their government.
You can also review Presidential Actions that call for more open and accountable government:
•Shutting the Revolving Door: President Obama has taken historic steps to close the "revolving door" that carries special interest influence in and out of the government.
•Mandating Federal Agencies Disclose Data: A Presidential Memorandum mandates an Open Government Directive directing specific actions to achieve transparency, openness, and engagement.
•Making the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) put citizens first: The President’s Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act directs that it be administered with a presumption of disclosure, not one of non-disclosure.
•Making classification a two-way street: For the first time, no records may remain classified indefinitely. An executive order on Classified National Security Information makes major changes to address the problem of over-classification and public access to formerly classified records.
Sunshine Week, the national initiative that focuses on transparency and open government, is a particularly apt time to unveil a site that highlights successes from across the executive branch. The administration's efforts to promote open and accountable government are on-going. Moving forward, the good government site will be a useful resource to everyone interested in how, and how far, the administration is changing the way Washington works and improving citizens' everyday lives.
White House, March 17, 2011:
Sunshine Week at the Department of Veterans Affairs
Posted by VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki
Ed. Note: This post is part of our Sunshine Week series on the blog. Sunshine Week is a national initiative to celebrate and focus on government transparency and open government.
The mission of the Department of Veterans Affairs – enshrined in our building – is “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan.” For our men and women in uniform who have fought for our country – serving them is a privilege and responsibility we take very seriously. At the VA, we are committed to continuing to meet and surpass our highest standards of care for each and every veteran, each and every day. Open government helps us do this: the publication of key health-related data to increase transparency, the creation of technological tools helping veterans to participate, and the harnessing of new ideas for innovation and collaboration, all fuel our mission.
During Sunshine Week we are reflecting on our accomplishments – not so we can rest, but so we can take inspiration to build on our successes. We’re on a deliberate and thoughtful path to become an even more people-centric, results-driven, and forward-looking organization. I invite you to visit http://www.va.gov/open/ to see for yourself. Here is a sample of important steps we have taken:
Health-Related Transparency Open Government Initiatives and Technical Tools
•Blue Button: In September 2010, we launched Blue Button capability that allows Veterans to download their personal health information from their My HealtheVet account. We developed Blue Button with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Defense, along with the Markle Foundation’s Consumer Engagement Workgroup. Since its launch, VA has had 125,000 unique Blue Button users; our partners have had over tens of thousands additional users. Incredibly, several industry partners have already created applications for mobile devices or web-based platforms to enhance users’ experience of Blue Button information. This is just one example of how the promise of open government can be realized – freeing the flow of information so that ordinary citizens (and extraordinary heroes) can benefit in their daily lives.
•Fast Track: In August 2010, we published the regulation that makes Veterans who served in Vietnam and who have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, ischemic heart disease, or hairy-cell leukemia eligible for health care and disability compensation benefits. After the Congressional review period, we started processing claims on October 30, 2010. With our industry partner, we developed the first end-to-end electronic claims processing system and are scaling this capability so all Veteran claims can be processed within 125 days.
•Data on Data.gov: We at VA take seriously the need to be transparent in the performance of VA Medical Centers. In November 2010, we published the ASPIRE tool, where Veterans can review how their hospital is performing against set goals. All these efforts to release health-related information show our determination to be open and accountable. As a health care organization, information transparency is key to providing quality care.
Participation and Collaboration Initiatives
•VA Innovation Initiative: We also conducted employee competitions, inviting colleagues to share their ideas to improve benefits claims processing and delivery of health care services for Veterans and their families. These contests – using web tools that make it easy, convenient, and electronically safe to submit and vote on original ideas – allow best ideas to bubble to the top. Over 50,000 VA employees contributed 10,000 ideas, and we are currently implementing 35 of these ideas and are planning our next employee innovation competition.
•Last June, we launched the VAi2 Industry Competition, this time asking our industry and academia partners to address six VA challenges:
◦Developing next-generation telehealth solutions
◦Improving polytrauma care
◦Preventing adverse drug events
◦Finding new models of care for dialysis and chronic kidney disease
◦Enabling Veteran entrepreneurship through Business Accelerator services
◦Deploying innovative housing solutions to reduce Veteran homelessness
We received about 300 proposals and selected over 20 after a careful review for further exploration and implementation.
•New Media: Communication is key to open government. In October 2010 we launched our first blog, VAntage Point, to enable a two-way dialogue with Veterans, their families, and citizens. VA continues to lead on other social media platforms with over 81,000 fans on Facebook and 10,000 followers on Twitter.
Our work on open government has helped us with better ways of doing business, harnessing the best information technologies, cutting red tape, and breaking through the bureaucracy. We owe it to our courageous military men and women to do better, and open government work is taking us there.