The Department of Veterans Affairs has established a new California-based center that would focus on the technological innovation of health care services. VA said Monday that it stood up the National Center for Collaborative Healthcare Innovation under a partnership with the Veterans Health Administration Innovation Ecosystem. NCCHI operates as part of the department’s Palo Alto Health Care System.

“The center is particularly exciting because it is uniquely designed as a catalyst to combine strengths from non-health care fields,” said Robert Wilkie, VA secretary and 2019 Wash100 Award recipient.

NCCHI will focus its efforts on artificial intelligence, workflow efficiencies and clinical decision support. The center’s location in Silicon Valley allows for collaboration with technology industry partners and other government entities.

Gen. Jay Raymond, head of the U.S. Space Command, has said that preparing for space warfare and preventing conflict in space will be the command’s first area of focus, C4ISRnet reported Tuesday. In a recent event at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, Raymond outlined four key priorities that must be addressed as Space Command begins its operations.

He said the command will handle offensive and defensive operations to protect the space interests of the U.S. and its allies. He added that Space Command must ensure the delivery of combat assets to joint and combined forces while fostering the development of lethal space forces.

“We find ourselves at a strategic inflection point where there’s nothing we do as a joint force that isn’t enabled by space, and yet, simultaneously, we can no longer have the luxury of assuming space superiority,” said Raymond.

Space Command was officially established as the 11th unified combatant command in August.

David Wennergren, CEO of the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council, wrote in an FCW commentary piece published Monday that the Office of Management and Budget’s Cloud Smart policy touches on several ideas and one is its emphasis on application rationalization.

“The term of art is ‘application rationalization’ — recognizing that while every legacy application doesn’t need to be tossed out, without a focused plan to address all of these systems, agencies will still have IT budgets skewed to sustaining the old rather than implementing the new,” he wrote.

He mentioned the opportunity to purchase “applications as a service” and how it could help agencies in their performance optimization and cost management operations.

Wennergren discussed the policy’s focus on cybersecurity and data layer security. He cited how zero trust networks could help agencies transition to risk management from risk aversion and advance the implementation of commercial best practices.

He said the policy also provides insights on the workforce and acquisition. “Just as cybersecurity efforts are adopting a risk-based approach, our acquisition efforts must similarly move away from approaches that are imagined to minimize risk but that in reality stifle innovation and speed to market,” he noted.