The Department of Health and Human Services is proposing to streamline patients’ access to electronic health information and mandate providers’ use of open data sharing platforms to foster transparency, HHS said Monday.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have issued the proposed rules calling for the healthcare industry to implement standardized application programming interfaces to enable easy and free access to patient health data through devices such as smartphones.

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HHS also wants to implement provisions under the 21st Century Cure Act that prohibits “information blocking” by providers and directs public access to comments on pricing data. Users will be allowed to report providers or hospitals that are participating in information blocking.

According to CMS Administrator Seema Verma, around 125 million patients will receive easy access to their health claims data once health insurers are mandated to share information with the public by 2020. The proposed healthcare delivery system regulations support the MyHealthEData effort aiming to streamline the flow of healthcare information.

The rules will cover programs such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Medicare Advantage as well as qualified health plans in the federally-facilitated exchanges.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has found a method to improve security for smart manufacturing systems with blockchain that provides tamper-proof transmission of data and traceability of information in the production process. NIST issued a report on Monday detailing how blockchain can help detect and deter potential digital threats in the manufacturing process.

The agency said the technology provided NIST engineers a digital thread replacing two-dimensional blueprints with 3D instructions capable of being electronically exchanged and processed during the manufacturing process. 

“Blockchain gives us both capabilities, we can build trustworthiness into digital manufacturing networks,” said NIST engineer Thomas Hedberg, author of the report. 

NIST said the Unified Modeling Language allows engineers to apply blockchain to the smart manufacturing network. UML enables users to monitor the flow of data, who is executing data exchanges, how and when the exchanges are taking place.

NIST is working with IBM, Lockheed Martin, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University and other 30 organization to promote using blockchain for smart manufacturing. The agency intends to increase its partnerships with industry and academia to support the initiative. 

NASA plans to reduce the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission’s orbit around the red planet to support data exchange between the agency and its future rovers on Mars. The space agency said Monday that it will lower MAVEN spacecraft’s elliptical orbit from 3,850 to 2,800 miles above the planet’s surface to serve as data-relay satellite for the Mars 2020 rover. 

MAVEN features an ultra-high-frequency radio transceiver to share data between Earth and the rovers or landers on Mars. NASA said the reduced orbit will provide the spacecraft with a stronger telecommunications antenna signal.

“It’s like using your cell phone,” said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator from the University of Colorado, Boulder. “The closer you are to a cell tower, the stronger your signal.” 

NASA launched MAVEN to study how Mars lost its atmosphere and continues to analyze the structure and composition of the planet’s upper atmosphere until it begins new communications tasks. The agency expects the spacecraft to continue operations through 2030.

The Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service is transitioning from a traditional enterprise data warehouse into a cloud-based “data lake” to support the bureau’s call center operations, Federal New Network reported Monday. The data lake serves as an inventory of raw data which the call centers will use to assist people who want to settle delinquent debts.

Tony Peralta, data architect for the Fiscal Service, said the data lake intends to transcribe voice files and get sentiment analysis from that information. He added that the traditional data inventory system resulted in some inefficiencies due to limits in configuration and hard-drive space. 

The data lake is based on the Workforce Community Cloud shared-service infrastructure which handles the voice transcription and sentiment analysis operations. The cloud architecture was provided by the Treasury’s Office of the Chief Information Officer.

A new Defense Intelligence Agency report concludes that the U.S. should continue to develop space-based capabilities to keep its advantage in the space domain, the Department of Defense reported Monday.

The “Challenges to Security in Space” report deals with the efforts of Russia and China to challenge the ability of the U.S. and other countries to use space. Those efforts include the development of space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance services, cyber space and jamming capabilities, ground-based anti-satellite missiles, directed energy weapons and space surveillance networks. To challenge militaries, North Korea and Iran are developing space-based services with jamming capabilities.

“Iran and North Korea maintain independent space launch capabilities, which can serve as avenues for testing ballistic missile technologies,” the report noted.

DIA officials told reporters at the Pentagon on Monday they’re anticipating countries such as Russia and China to develop technologies designed to counter U.S. space capabilities.
 

Max Everett, chief information officer at the Department of Energy, has said the department will be moving email systems to the cloud with a $15M loan from the Technology Modernization Fund Board, Federal News Network reported Friday.

In late 2018, DOE received an initial $4M from TMF to start the cloud migration and has moved nearly 6,000 email accounts to the platform. The department operates 64 email systems that support over 184,000 mailboxes. DOE said it requested the load last year supporting the plan to place 19 of its 45 on-premise email systems to the cloud. 

The TMF loan is expected to support future migration of the department’s remaining 26 on-premise email systems. DOE said the extra funding would help “accelerate the implementation of the DOE enterprise cloud email” and lead to “large scale operational benefits and costs savings.” TMF also provided loans to the departments of Labor and Agriculture and the General Services Administration.