The Department of Veterans Affairs is working to augment its health care system with new implementations as part of the Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks or MISSION act. The legislation, passed in 2018, intends to streamline the delivery of health care services and help veterans access more care options that suit their needs, VA said Monday.

The department intends to do this via consolidation of different health services, and seeks to streamline appointment scheduling and community coordination upon implementation. Private sector care options would also become available under the bill.

“Veterans will continue to talk to their care team or scheduler as they have been doing to get the care they need,” said Robert Wilkie, VA secretary and 2019 Wash100 Award winner.

The Department of Health and Human Services launched a new program aiming to transform primary care and reduce administrative burdens for health care providers through a set of payment models. HHS said Monday that the CMS Primary Cares Initiative seeks to support patients with chronic conditions and serious illnesses and has five payment model options: Primary Care First, PCF – High Need Populations, Direct Contracting – Global, Direct Contracting – Professional and Direct Contracting – Geographic.

“Building on the experience of previous models and ideas of past administrations, these models will test out paying for health and outcomes rather than procedures on a much larger scale than ever before,” said HHS Secretary Alex Azar. “These models can serve as an inflection point for value-based transformation of our healthcare system, and American patients and providers will be the first ones to benefit.”

The two options under the PCF payment model seek to reduce hospital utilization and healthcare costs by incentivizing providers through performance-based payment adjustments. The PCF model will be tested for five years starting January 2020.

The DC payment model options are designed to establish “a competitive delivery system environment where organizations offering greater efficiencies and better quality of care will be financially rewarded,” according to HHS. HHS will carry out the CMS Primary Cares Initiative through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Innovation Center.

A recently released Internal Revenue Service report estimates that operations and maintenance costs for IRS information technology systems will reach $3 billion by fiscal 2026, Nextgov reported Monday. 

The six-year Integrated Business Modernization Plan released on Thursday states that the IRS spends over $2.2 billion to operate and maintain its systems every year. The agency expects to see costs of around $2.3 to $2.7 billion over a six-year period, along with an increased risk of a systemwide crash.

According to the report, the IRS seeks to implement emerging capabilities such as automated technology and advanced analytics in line with industry standards to modernize operations and facilitate taxpayer compliance.

“Deploying these capabilities, while simplifying our legacy applications and infrastructure, is necessary for stabilizing the rising cost associated with maintaining our IT ecosystem,” the report noted. The plan cites four modernization pillars that cover issues under taxpayer experience, core services, updated agency operations and cybersecurity.

Dovarius Peoples, former deputy to the commanding general of the U.S. Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command, has been named the chief information officer of the Army Corps of Engineers, Federal News Network reported Monday. He succeeds Greg Garcia and will officially assume the role on April 28. In his new capacity, Peoples will manage USACE’s fiscal 2019 budget for information technology efforts valued at around $576 million.Â

Prior to joining NETCOM, the government sector veteran held senior IT leadership roles at the National Security Agency, U.S. Cyber Command, Defense Information Systems Agency and Office of Personnel Management. He also serves as a member of the Association for Computer Machinery comprised of international experts in computing technology.