Medicaid

As the need for public assistance programs – and the equal need to reduce government spending -increases, a variety of federal assistance programs are under tremendous pressure to maximize their limited resources. Key to this effort is the importance of ferreting out fraud, waste and abuse, and eliminating inefficiencies, while ensuring that these services are provided to those individuals that qualify to receive them.

That’s no easy task, given the patchwork of aid programs offered by a number of agencies, each with its own governing rules, qualification criteria and application process. Regrettably, the network of assistance programs has become mired in its own bureaucracy. Keep reading →

Communication about the perils of taking inappropriate risk – and how to accept or not accept IT risk in government – is seriously lacking these days. There is clearly a link missing in the chain that connects government business managers with matters of importance such as IT risk.

Take for instance, the Utah data breach and all of the “lessons learned” that have been discussed since following a data breach that exposed the health data of 500,000 people and social security numbers of 280,000 Utah Medicaid recipients. The incident, which took place earlier this year, led the executive director of Utah’s Department of Technology Services to resign in May. Keep reading →


The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) plans to further reduce health care fraud with the implementation of a two-factor identity credentialing system for individuals accessing their records online.

The system is also intended to safeguard users’ identities, supporting the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace.” The technology is compliant with NIST’s electronic authentication guidelines and the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA). Keep reading →