IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

According to a joint statement from St. Barnabas, based in Livingston, and Atlantic Health, based in Morristown, both parties have signed a "memorandum of understanding, agreeing to explore synergies between the two organizations."

The statement said the companies are seeking to improve heath care delivery, reduce costs, create better relationships with area physicians and increase referrals, and prepare for continuing health care reform.

Part of the reason is that the larger agencies are powerhouses whose bureaucracies can dwarf even the governor’s office. Any effort by state leadership—governor, lawmakers or the state CIO—to tackle IT governance head-on is admirable in and of itself. It’s rare that there is ever highly centralized control of IT governance in any of the super-size states.

The new network is intended to help make the Golden State a national leader in using telemedicine and broadband technology, officials said, and will link more than 300 health care facilities and 800 doctors’ offices to state and national broadband networks.

Government information technology procurement has been largely conducted on an independent basis, with each federal agency determining its own needs and acquiring the infrastructure -- both hardware and software -- to meet those needs. However, the procurement landscape may change significantly with the latest breakthrough in IT -- cloud computing.

The grants will include technology improvements for safety net providers such as health clinics, critical access hospitals and country health departments.

For many, e-government means that the government agency has a Web site. The degree to which that Web site is interactive and allows the public to network to obtain services over the Internet is the benchmark for how "electronic" your government really is. Of course, the federal government has its definition of e-government that is set out in the E-Government Act of 2002. This legislation established a new Office of Electronic Government within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The OMB provides guidelines on a wide range of e-government issues.

The grant of $102 million was awarded to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. It will pay for high speed, interactive links between the teaching hospital in Little Rock and all 75 counties in Arkansas, as well as links among local agencies.

However, the new project should help. The centers will now have access to specialists at UC-Merced via teleconferencing and other technology, which will be used to sustain remote consultations. Specialties represented will first include dermatology, psychiatry, pediatric specialties, endocrinology and gastroenterology, but more are to come.

The three-year, $27 million project will increase bandwidth capacity for telecommunications so that clinics, hospitals and other medical sites will be able to connect directly to all members of the network, plus external providers and services.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has awarded the Information Trust Institute, or ITI, at the University a $15 million stimulus grant. The grant will allow the University to lead a consortium of 12 of the country’s top computer science and medical universities, including Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University and Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded a $980,000 grant to help the institutions create the Heartland Telehealth Resource Center to accomplish the task.

“Almost any tool a health professional would normally use can be used through telemedicine,” Ryan Spaulding, director of the Center for Telemedicine and Telehealth at KU Med, said in the release. “Doctors are able to listen to patients’ hearts with stethoscopes, look in their ears with otoscopes and check their skin with dermascopes.”

The Oklahoma Office of State Finance and OK.gov, Oklahoma’s official website, today announce updates to the Oklahoma State Filing System that enable state agencies to submit new filing types online and simultaneously to the Governor, House of Representatives, State Senate, and Secretary of State, leading to business efficiencies and a reduction in the state’s consumption of paper.

There remain significant disparities between urban and rural areas in delivering broadband connectivity in the United States, despite a relatively high number of high broadband connections nationwide, according to a report issued by content delivery network provider Akamai.

The report, which is the first of what Akamai says will be a quarterly "State of the Internet" series, shows that the United States has the seventh-highest percentage of high-speed broadband connections in the world, with 20% of all connections achieving speeds of 5Mbps or higher. However, when looking at the overall percentage of regular broadband connections, the United States drops to the 24th spot in the world, with 62% of all Internet connections achieving speeds of 2Mbps or higher.