On December 8th, GovDataHosting sponsored the 2021 CMS Industry Day, Embracing Change: Adapting for the Future. This virtual event included a great line up of inspiring speakers who are leaders in innovative technologies. A few highlights included discussions on how technology is driving change in the health care industry, including the roadmap for Medicaid and CHIP programs. CMS also led discussions on “Health Equity and the Awareness of Disparity,” CMS hosting solutions procurement, and “In the Mind of a CO.”
A Few Key Presentations:
Anita Pinder, Director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights, CMS, presented an interesting discussion on “Diversity, equity and inclusion.” She spoke about how organizations can become more conscious about being inclusive and removing biases. Recent initiatives to make progress in the area of DEI for CMS included a project where CMS developed a specific plan that helped them communicate their commitment to DEI and assisted in creating a strategy for having a sustainable change in the organization. They developed eleven focus groups to gather qualitative data and generate a diagnostic report in January of this year.
Ryan Kooy, Director of the Division for DDCC, OAGM, and Mark Oh , Director of the Infrastructure and User Services Group, the OIT in CMS, presented on upcoming CMS solution procurement to support CMS’ hybrid cloud computing services. They spoke about the future of CMS application hosting. From their two locations, one on the East coast and one in Kent, Washington, they will be able to provide robust hardware and virtualization and integrated services. The two primary locations will leverage the backbone as well as the public cloud and establish integrated services that cover both the public cloud as well as on premise hybrid locations.
Kimberly Tatu, Contracting Officer, OAGM, CMS, led a discussion on various executive orders and policies affecting contractors. She spoke about modernizing the federal acquisition process and the need to understand regulation surrounding changes within the contracting environment.
