Perhaps nowhere is it more imperative to be resourceful than county health and human services agencies, which strive to meet citizens' most basic needs. Compare notes with such agencies and you'll be met with dizzying mandates: improve client outcomes; meet federal directives; chip away at fraud; track regulatory changes; confront duplication and inefficiency; plug gaps; and deal with disparate systems and technologies while encouraging workers to adopt new business processes meant to help alleviate those challenges, but instead add to them.

India is experiencing a double burden of disease with persistent infectious disease coupled with increasing incidence of chronic disease like cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Unfortunately, due to lack of specialists care in rural areas, most chronic diseases are diagnosed at an advanced stage, when treatment becomes complicated and expensive.

The three independents who represent country regions of NSW and Queensland have made it clear they will go in to bat for rural Australia in negotiating their terms.

With broadband high on the agenda, the provision of e-health services to the bush is also of major concern for regions that have been plagued by unreliable communications and disparate systems.

According to IDC Government Insights public sector organisations in the Asia Pacific region faced renewed financial pressures because of the global financial crisis and an increased demand for service delivery.

The report Looking Ahead: Articulating Cloud Competencies for the Asia/Pacific Public Sector highlights trends and concerns regarding the adoption of cloud computing in the public sector.

oreSee Results, an online customer satisfaction measurement enterprise, recently released their Q1 2010 E-Government Transparency Index, revealing online transparency to be a key component in citizens' trust of federal websites.

ForeSee Results surveyed 54,000 U.S. citizens who visited 23 federal websites in the first quarter of 2010 to produce the Transparency Index. The top five priority elements for measuring citizen satisfaction included transparency, search, functionality, navigation, and site performance, with transparency ranking the highest.

The General Services Administration wants pioneering approaches to improve its E-Government Travel System (ETS).

For their customers, GSA officials want an end-to-end management service that automates the travel process securely over the Internet. They also are looking to incorporate emerging technology from cloud computing. The new management system, known as ETS2, is positioned to integrate on-demand service, ubiquitous network access, data-driven transparency and a little “green” thinking, according to a request for proposals from GSA.

It should deliver a prototype "that's impossible to ignore", Victoria's top health bureaucrat Fran Thorn says.

"I can't say there's a lot of money for e-health at this stage and that's a disappointment to me," she told the Health Informatics Conference in Melbourne last week. "But being an optimist, if we can use that $500m in a very targeted approach of building the prototype case for this, then I think it would be impossible for anyone to continue to ignore what in the end is a very small investment, in the order of a couple of per cent (of the total health budget)."

The establishment of an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) within St Kitts & Nevis must be a top priority if the country's technology-based development agenda is to be fully realised. This point was highlighted by international Internet Strategist Mr. Bevil Wooding at the St Kitts/Nevis national symposium on Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) hosted last Friday by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU) in collaboration with US nonprofit research institute, Packet Clearing House (PCH).

The event was designed to create greater public awareness of the role, function and benefits of Internet Exchange Points to the development of internet-based industry targeting domestic services and content. An Internet Exchange Point is a facility where domestic internet traffic is exchanged between service providers at no cost.

During the visit, the GIA officials gave two presentations to the guest delegation; one on government services database system (Khadamate) and the other on the package of cloud computing services that the GIA started to provide to government entities with the aim of minimizing cost on one hand and enhancing the opportunities of integration and connectivity among these entities at the level of infrastructures, technological platforms, practices and procedures on the other.

Assistant Minister of Communications and Technology Ahmad Basel al-Khashi said in a statement to SANA these registers include the civil, judicial, health and the real estate among other registries.

He pointed out that the Cabinet has asked all ministries to include the projects for building their own national registers and making them available for electronic exchange within the coming five-year plan.