Jose Arrieta, chief information officer of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said the use of commercial-off-the-shelf technologies resulted in a more flexible approach to gathering data on the COVID-19 pandemic, FedScoop reported Wednesday.
Arrieta told attendees during a recent webinar that the department’s HHS Protect data analytics tool was able to establish fortified identity, credential and access management (ICAM) defenses while securing the transmission of data.
He noted that foreign adversaries can easily exploit ICAM layers and render existing government security protocols obsolete. The ICAM capability can help agencies other than HHS fortify their network defenses amid the ongoing health crisis, according to Arrieta.
“The way that you actually deliver and the way that you actually contract for a business outcome related to digitizing a process is totally different than it was a few years ago, maybe even a few months ago,” he said. “I think the pandemic has changed that.”
HHS Protect was launched in April 2020 and has collected over 200 health data sets across 6,146 hospitals and 80 percent of private labs to date, the report states.
