By GCN Staff
Mar 02, 2021
The Department of Veterans Affairs is installing 5G networks at its Miami and Puget Sound health care facilities.
Working with T-Mobile, which currently provides the in-building 4G LTE wireless connectivity at the Miami Health Care System, the VA will install in-building 5G radios for 2.5 GHz spectrum to deliver speeds of 300 megabit/sec with peaks up to 1 gigabit/sec.
The faster network will allow medical teams to quickly move and access large, complex data files, such as imaging results, labs and medical charts, without having to be tethered to a computer, the company said.
T-Mobile already provides up to 70,000 lines of wireless service to doctors, nurses and hospital staff across VA hospitals and has helped enhance access to the VA s telehealth platform, VA Video Connect.
By GCN Staff
Feb 26, 2021
To improve the quality of medical care for military service members, researchers are adopting artificial intelligence and markerless motion-capture technology to assess the biomechanical skills of medical trainees and provide feedback for improvement.
“Simulation-based medical skill training, both initial and refresher training, require systematic, objective, high quality trainee evaluation and feedback,” the Army’s Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium said in a request for proposals. Unfortunately, MTEC said, evaluation and feedback on trainees’ performance are currently based on trainers’ standards rather than on an objective skill performance standard.
The Investigating Methods for Performance Overdrive (IMPROVE) program aims to address these assessment challenges. In December 2020, MTEC tapped the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to develop a simulation-based training system that compares the physical performance of medical traine
By Raj Parameswaran
Feb 26, 2021
As we look down the road, many promising technologies are finding greater use across the federal government. In my opinion, no technology holds more promise in the immediate future than intelligent automation using robotic process automation (RPA).
RPA will continue to grow as a valuable tool for government IT leaders because it allows the immediate expansion and scaling of human labor without impacting existing systems. Whenever agencies try to automate tasks, there is often a significant development effort. With RPA, an agency can implement and test on a small scale and then quickly expand to automate additional manual tasks.
By GCN Staff
Feb 25, 2021
The Defense Logistics Agency has ordered up a 3D printing factory housed in a shipping container.
Now under development, the rugged 3D printing pod would be up to 40-feet long and be set up in a standard 40-foot container so it could be deployed directly to the field to manufacture parts in support of battlefield operations, disaster relief or other remote missions.
With a $1.6 million contract to ExOne, DLA plans to use the company’s military-edition 3D printer for manufacturing products or tooling from over 20 metal, ceramic and other powder materials.
ExOne’s binder jet 3D printing is an additive manufacturing (AM) process that transforms powdered materials transforms into precision parts by using an industrial printhead to selectively deposit alternating layers of a liquid binder and powder particles.
By Natalie Alms
Feb 25, 2021
Of the $400 billion in CARES Act unemployment benefits distributed last year, states paid over $5.4 billion in potentially fraudulent unemployment claims between March and October of 2020, according to the Department of Labor’s inspector general. The actual number may reach tens of billions of dollars, the watchdog said.
In California alone, at least 10% of the benefits paid since the start of the pandemic have been to fraudulent claims, and that number could be as high as 27%, or $29 billion, the IG said in a Feb. 23 memo. Other states have also reported fraudulent claims. New York stated it paid $1 billion in fraudulent claims, and Maryland claimed $501 million, according to the IG.