OMB adds health IT to management agenda score card
- By Jason Miller
- Jul 30, 2007
The Bush administration is now tracking four agencies' progress in adopting health information technology standards and promoting public access to cost and quality data.
Under a new area of the President's Management Agenda, the Office of Management and Budget will evaluate how the Office of Personnel Management and the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, and Veterans Affairs meet specific criteria for improving their management and use of health IT.
Clay Johnson, OMB's deputy director for management, said today that the administration has been measuring agency progress in that area since the previous quarter and decided to permanently add it to the quarterly score card.
OMB also will begin measuring six agencies' performance on improved credit management. VA, the Small Business Administration and the departments of Agriculture, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Treasury are responsible for a major part of the $251 billion in direct loans and more than $1.1 trillion in loan guarantees for the federal government.
"Putting these into the [President's Management Agenda] is one sure way to get agencies to focus on what is success and make progress toward these goals," Johnson said during a press briefing. "We defined success and have gotten agencies to buy into it."
With today's announcement, OMB has now added five categories to the five original ones on the score card, which it began using in 2001. Each quarter, the administration grades agencies' progress in workforce management, competitive sourcing, e-government, financial performance, performance management, improper payments, real property asset management, and faith-based and community initiatives. All agencies are graded on the first five areas, but only certain ones are evaluated on the latter three.
OMB added health IT to support President Bush's 2006 executive order calling for agencies to promote transparency and reduce costs, said Tim Young, OMB's associate administrator of e-government and IT.
"It is information sharing and technology," Young said. "We will measure how they build their systems to enable interoperability. On the sharing aspect, they also leverage standards to encourage DOD to share e-health records."
OPM also will be held accountable for how its contractors use electronic health records for federal employees, Young added.
Overall, agencies' progress in the original five categories ? workforce management, competitive sourcing, e-government, financial performance and performance management ? remained flat. For the most recent score card, OMB said 12 agencies saw their scores drop in at least one category, while six had their grades improve in at least one category.
Under e-government, the Commerce and Labor departments dropped to red and yellow, respectively, while the Smithsonian and OMB raised their scores to yellow.
Young said OMB's and the Smithsonian's scores improved because they completed a segment of their enterprise architecture. Meanwhile, Commerce's score dropped because Congress did not let the agency transfer funds for e-government programs, while Labor had programs on the management watch list, he added.
Congressional restrictions were one of the main reasons six agencies' grades dropped in the competitive-sourcing category, Johnson said.
The Energy Department dropped two colors to red, while USDA, HUD, Labor and the State and Transportation departments fell to yellow.
"We must do a better job of educating Congress on the benefits of the program so they stop prohibiting this," Johnson said.
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