The U.S. Navy seeks to reinforce the service branch’s collaboration capacities through the creation of five regional tech bridges in the U.S.

The Naval Expeditions office teamed up with the military service’s Systems Commands unit and the Office of Naval Research to connect, optimize and sustain acceleration ecosystems in off-base locations within San Diego, Florida, Indianapolis, Washington and Rhode Island, the Navy said Tuesday. According to the Navy, the selected tech bridges will collaborate with various organizations including private companies and academic institutions to conduct projects to address technological concerns.

“These five spaces will lower barriers that traditionally hamper external collaboration,” said James Geurts, assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition at the Navy. “I envision these as the first five, of a great number of tech bridges, to enable the Department of the Navy to achieve its goal of agility at scale,” added Geurts.

The Sequoia Project has entered into a cooperative agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to help create and implement an interoperability framework for electronic health information sharing.

HHS said Tuesday the nonprofit organization will serve as the recognized coordinating entity responsible for developing, implementing and maintaining the common agreement component of ONC’s Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement. The Sequoia Project will work to create the baseline technical requirements for health information networks looking to join in the framework and monitor their compliance with the common agreement.

Mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act, the framework aims to improve the sharing of electronic health records by reducing technical and legal burdens for health information networks and addressing challenges that hinder trusted exchange of data. ONC Chief Don Rucker said the organization was selected as the recognized coordinating entity through a competitive process.

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general released a report stating that the Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to implement information technology management practices necessary to support response and recovery operations.

The report, released last week, states that FEMA’s deficiencies in IT management led to challenges in emergency response to hurricanes and wildfires in 2017. According to the report, personnel had to use personal computers rather than FEMA systems to achieve mission goals.

“Amid this management environment, FEMA has not provided its personnel with the IT systems necessary to support response and recovery operations effectively,” the IG stated. “FEMA’s legacy IT systems are not integrated and lack the functionality needed to keep pace with high-volume processing.”

FEMA also failed to establish a strategy for managing its aging IT systems and equipment on a day-to-day basis, according to the IG. Lack of funding for IT modernization also resulted in systems that lack real-time efficiency and interoperability with external platforms.

The IG report cites the FEMA chief information officer’s limited IT management authority and decentralized resource allocation procedures as factors that contributed to the agency’s lack of effective IT management.

The Government Accountability Office discovered that while the Department of Defense met scheduling and cost estimate requirements for reforming its business operations, the preliminary status of its initiatives will make future feasibility assessments difficult. GAO said in a report published Tuesday that it evaluated DoD’s April 2019 plan which includes eight initiatives for reforming its logistics, human resources, contracting and real estate management operations.

According to the watchdog, DoD has provided limited documentation of its progress on implementing the reforms, including cost savings. The department has also failed to properly identify sources of funding for the reform initiatives.

DoD stated in its strategy that implementing these initiatives would cost at least $116M through fiscal year 2021.