Keeping IT Brief

Adopting a CX-focused approach to AI in public health services is crucial for improving healthcare delivery in today's digital world. By harnessing the power of AI and focusing on user needs, government health agencies can drive innovation, improve results, and build a healthcare system that puts the well-being and satisfaction of people front and center. This podcast will help you understand ways to leverage CX when building AI solutions and vise versa and the outcomes achieved by integrating the two.
Rujuta Waknis
REI Director of Solution Engineering
Rujuta Waknis is the Director of Offerings at REI Systems, with over 20 years of experience creating technology products and innovative solutions in public sector domains such as grants management and acquisitions. She is an advocate for the improvement of systems through mindful technology transformation, human centered design, data driven-decision making and AI technology. She has successfully helped modernize numerous enterprise systems for federal agencies over her career. She holds a masters degree in systems engineering from Virginia Tech.
Amanda Thomas
REI Principal Customer Experience
Amanda Thomas is a Principal Customer Experience Designer at REI Systems with over 10 years of experience in product design and media production. Specializing in modernizing and optimizing complex systems, she aims to leverage emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning to enhance product outcomes. With a focus on creating intuitive user experiences, Amanda's expertise lies in transforming the way users interact with digital products.
REI Systems
REI Systems provides reliable, effective, and innovative technology solutions that advance federal, state, local, and nonprofit missions. Our technologists and consultants are passionate about solving complex challenges that impact millions of lives.
We take a Mindful Modernization® approach in delivering our application modernization, grants management systems, government data analytics, AI/ML, and advisory services. Mindful Modernization is the REI Way of delivering mission impact by aligning our government customers' strategic objectives to measurable outcomes through people, processes, and technology. Learn more at REIsystems.com.

It has been over one year since President Biden signed an executive order with an ambitious goal to “place people at the center of everything government does”
This executive order is promoting changes to social, financial and health services provided to Americans from government agencies when they experience the following events in life:

• Approaching retirement,
• Recovering from a disaster,
• Navigating the transition to civilian life following military service,
• Birth and early childhood for low-income women and their children; and
• Facing a financial shock and becoming newly eligible for critical support

The framing of this work as supporting life experiences means that federal agencies will need to work together to understand and support their shared customers.
We’re joined by Nelly Kinsella, Organizational Change Manager of Anthro-Tech, a human centered design consultancy that works for social impact to discuss the progress that agencies have made on the goal of the executive order

Nelly Kinsella, Organizational Change Manager, Anthro-Tech
Nelly is an experienced communications strategist with a knack for digital engagement. She has led or supported the launch and maintenance of nearly a dozen digital products, including informational and educational websites, intranets, and highly integrated web and mobile applications. She loves to untangle knots, learn on-the-fly and pull apart the components of complicated situations.
Nelly holds Masters degrees in both Health Administration and Public Health Policy, as well as a graduate certificate in User-Centered Design (UCD) from the University of Washington. She is a scrum-certified product owner and practitioner of agile development.
Fueling Nelly's role as Organizational Change Manager at Anthro-Tech is her passion for coaching teams in UCD tools and process. Specifically, she is motivated to get organizations with a social-impact mission to harness the power of user personas and relentlessly enhance the customer experience.
Anthro-Tech
Anthro-Tech is a human-centered design consultancy focused on government agencies, nonprofits, and enterprises with a social impact mission. We help organizations gain a deep understanding of their customers through research to design products and services that are usable, useful, and make a positive impact on peoples’ everyday lives. Over the past 20 years, we’ve partnered with many organizations to transform how they engage their customers, including dozens of county, state, and federal government organizations, global foundations, and fortune 500 clients. Anthro-Tech was founded in 1997. We are a women-owned business with offices and user experience labs in Olympia and Seattle. We’re driven by our purpose - to build a great business that makes things better for people.

With public health crises like COVID-19, the importance of modernizing IT infrastructure to adapt to healthcare challenges is paramount for federal agencies. As agencies like CMS are working towards modernization, they are faced with many logistical issues that make rapid implementation infrastructure difficult.

GitLab Public Sector teamed up with RVCM to support CMS’ batCAVE initiative enabling the agency to develop and deploy software changes at a fast, scalable and efficient rate, all while balancing security and resiliency.

By leveraging GitLab’s complete DevOps platform, CMS has:

· Increased transparency between partners and customers

· Allowed office environments to focus on business and mission issues

· Improved mission delivery and the development of more effective features

Today we hear from members of the team bringing this vision to life.

Bob Stevens, Vice President of Public Sector

Bob Stevens is the Vice President of Public Sector at GitLab Inc. GitLab’s single application, DevOps platform helps organizations deliver software faster and more efficiently while strengthening their security and compliance.

Since 2021, Bob has led the public sector team by helping agencies fundamentally change the way their development, security, and operations teams collaborate. In his 25 years, he has built rapport and trust with government agencies and industry leaders. Prior to GitLab, he was VP of the Americas at Lookout Federal Inc., where he focused on providing mobile threat visibility and protection to enterprise and government entities. He continues to serve as a board member of Lookout.

GitLab

As The One DevOps Platform, GitLab provides one interface, one data store, one permissions model, one value stream, one set of reports, one spot to secure your code, one location to deploy to any cloud, and one place for everyone to contribute. The platform is the only true cloud-agnostic end-to-end DevOps platform that brings together all DevOps capabilities in one place.

With GitLab, organizations can create, deliver, and manage code quickly and continuously to translate business vision into reality. GitLab empowers customers and users to innovate faster, scale more easily, and serve and retain customers more effectively. Built on Open Source, GitLab works alongside its growing community, which is composed of thousands of developers and millions of users, to continuously deliver new DevOps innovations.

Brett Kimura, President at RVCM (RevaComm)

Brett Kimura has over fifteen years of experience in human-centered design, Agile software, and DevSecOps. He has served RVCM (RevaComm) as a web developer, IT manager and engineer, VP of operations, and is currently president of the organization, a position he has held since 2020.

Brett is always looking to help organizations across the United States grow by providing business process and modernization solutions across many distinct industries.

RevaComm

RVCM (RevaComm) is a leading digital transformation organization offering human-centered Design, Agile software development, DevSecOps, cybersecurity, cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and application modernization services. For over 30 years, we’ve helped organizations become industry leaders using fresh experiences, uncompromising customer care, and cutting-edge technology. Learn more by visiting RVCM.com.

When military patients live far from their health clinic or hospital, or they find traveling for in-person treatment difficult, obtaining quality care when and how they need it can be challenging. Military Health System (MHS) Video Connect (MHS VC) is a secure, live, web-based solution providing accessible care to active-duty service members, Veterans, and their family members.

In 2021, the Leidos Partnership for Defense Health deployed MHS VC to CONUS locations in just eight months, providing critical capability during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of July 2022, MHS VC is deployed to all Military Treatment Facilities worldwide and has over 115,000 provisioned users. The MHS VC telehealth system is helping achieve Defense Health Agency’s combat readiness mission, providing an efficient and effective solution for healthcare delivery whenever and wherever needed.

On today’s episode we talk with Joshua Lordemann with Leidos about how MHS VC is advancing efforts in telehealth.

Joshua Lordemann, Chief Engineer for Virtual Health on DHMSM and Leidos Master Solution Architect

Mr. Lordemann is the Chief Engineer for Virtual Health on DHMSM and a Leidos Master Solution Architect. He is passionate about building and leading teams for digital modernization activities to deliver advanced solutions, products, and services. His experience in DevSecOps, agile, cybersecurity, and ITIL provide focused leadership of teams delivering scalable and secure analytical solutions. He leads R&D, enterprise architecture, and strategic technical portfolio activities at Leidos and on contract for the Department of Defense, Defense Health Agency, Veterans Affairs, Department of Justice, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Department of Energy, and other Federal organizations.

Leidos

Leidos is a Fortune 500® technology, engineering, and science solutions and services leader working to solve the world’s toughest challenges in the defense, intelligence, civil, and health markets. The company’s 43,000 employees support vital missions for government and commercial customers. Headquartered in Reston, Va., Leidos reported annual revenues of approximately $13.7 billion for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021. For more information, visit http://www.Leidos.com.

Addressing President Biden’s Customer Experience (CX) Mandate in Federal Health In December 2021, President Biden published an Executive Order that mandated federal agencies to adopt the customer experience (CX) approach in their primary strategy and operations. Biden stated that “the government’s primary mission is to serve. By placing people at the center of everything we do, the government will be able to deliver timely, modern and secure services to you — the people.”

With December’s EO and the recent news from OMB, the White House wants to fundamentally change the way Americans access government services and benefits by focusing on the “life experiences” of those seeking assistance. CX efforts should make government services and processes easier to interact with and utilize, specifically actions aligned with life events that often require interaction with the government. In turn, these executive statements should lead to stronger trust in government, especially as we’re over two years into a global pandemic, when federal health plans of action are of the utmost importance.

Rita Breen

In her current position as the Agile and Human Centered Design Practices Director at National Government Services, Rita’s primary goal is to solve mission-critical challenges for federal patients and customers. She has nearly two decades of project management (PM) experience and has been a part of the NGS team since 2018. Rita mainly supports the technical PMs and HCD teams that drive the customer-centered approach to FedHealth IT. She and the team focus on solving major pain points while bolstering product quality and improving customer experiences across the board. Rita is truly passionate about identifying the key needs of citizens, setting actionable metrics and learning to meet them with empathy and understanding.

National Government Services (NGS)

For more than 50 years, National Government Services has been empowering federal healthcare agencies to improve lives and communities. Its core business areas include digital health, providing federal IT solutions and services for healthcare, and business process Solutions. This includes its role as a Medicare contractor for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Part of the Anthem family of businesses, NGS is headquartered in Indianapolis, IN, and employs more than 1,500 associates across the country.