Annual Performance Plan and Report

Topics on this page: Goal 2. Objective B | Table of Related Performance Measures | Analysis of Results | Plans for the Future | Objective Progress Update Summary

Goal 2. Objective B: Foster and apply innovative solutions to health, public health, and human services challenges

HHS depends on collaboration to realize its goals. Every day, HHS agencies work with their federal, state, local, tribal, urban Indian, nongovernmental, and private sector partners to improve the health and well-being of Americans. HHS is using technology to identify new approaches to enable citizens to contribute their ideas to the work of government that will yield innovative solutions to our most pressing health and human service challenges. HHS employs an array of innovative participation and collaboration mechanisms to improve delivery of consumer information on patient safety and health, provide for medical research collaborations on patient engagement, provide technology for teamwork, and find creative ideas in the workplace. These innovations include engaging Web 2.0 technologies with several functional capabilities, including blogging to rate and rank ideas and priorities, crowdsourcing to identify public opinion and preferences, group collaboration tools such as file-sharing services, idea generation tools, mobile technologies such as text messaging, and online competitions.

Innovation is a key element of HHS’s intra-agency Open Government initiative. Through this initiative, the administration is promoting agency transparency, public participation, and public-private collaboration across federal departments. Every part of the Department contributes to making HHS more open and innovative. The Office of the Secretary led this Objective’s assessment as a part of the Strategic Review.

Objective 2.B Table of Related Performance Measures

Increase number of identified opportunities for public engagement and collaboration among agencies (Lead Agency - IOS; Measure ID - 1.1)

Increase the number of participation and collaboration tools and activities conducted by the participation and collaboration community of practice (Lead Agency - IOS; Measure ID - 1.3)

Increase the number of opportunities for the public to co-create solutions through open innovation (Lead Agency - IOS; Measure ID - 1.4)

Increase the number of innovative solutions developed across the Department (Lead Agency - IOS; Measure ID - 1.5)

Analysis of Results

Enhancing opportunities for public participation and collaboration in HHS activities is a key priority for the HHS Open Government efforts. It is widely understood that to deliver effectively on our mission, we must leverage the collective creativity and wisdom of our stakeholders. Federal Advisory Committees are one key way of ensuring public and expert involvement and advice in federal decision-making. Another way to involve the public in helping HHS to solve pressing agency problems is through the use of challenges and competitions in which members of the public can participate. It is notable that some of the challenges issued over the course of FY 2014 have been very innovative. For example, the Breast Cancer Startup Challenge issued by that National Institutes of Health National Cancer Center has led to the creation of 11 new start-up companies and was recognized as a Secretary's Pick in the HHS Innovates competitions. An additional important vehicle to engage our stakeholders is through the development and release of application programming interfaces (API). APIs allow external websites and services to interface with HHS databases - thus allowing external partners to mix information and media from HHS services and datasets into their sites and applications. In FY 2014, HHS exceeded its targets, identifying 747 opportunities for engagement. In addition to the number of engagements secured, HHS enhanced its use of technology to facilitate public meetings, continued to grow and mature it challenges and competitions program, as well as added more than a hundred new APIs.

Developing new types of effective collaboration and participation initiatives at HHS often involves a focused effort by a select group of individuals. HHS’s approach takes two forms: in some instances members of the HHS OS Innovations Team have seeded these new initiatives; and in others HHS operating and staff divisions have led. Each of the projects is labor-intensive, and thus only a few are selected in each year. In FY 2014, the HHS Innovations Staff and its agency collaborators (e.g. innovation staff from HHS operating and staff divisions who partner with OS on projects) successfully implemented 13 projects. Each of the projects is labor-intensive, and thus only a few projected are selected in a given year. These projects included the second round of HHS Ignite, an innovation program that provides seed funding and mentoring to HHS employees for the purpose of incubating and testing new ideas; the seventh round of the HHS Innovates competition, a program that recognizes and shares promising new approaches developed by HHS employees; the third round of HHS Entrepreneurs, a program that pairs internal and external expertise to solve high priority problems; and the fifth annual HHS Datapalooza, an event that attracted over 2000 participants and showcased 250 exciting new health applications and products, among others.

Plans for the Future

HHS will be retiring measures 1.1 and 1.3 in FY 2015 and replacing them with two new measures (1.4 and 1.5) that better capture the environment of innovation the Department seeks to foster. A high priority for the Open Government Plan is to increase the public's capacity to co-create solutions through challenge competitions. Challenge competitions can provide a fresh approach to solving problems, including implementing new methodologies and mechanisms for spurring innovation, helping agencies to advance their core missions, and providing new acquisition methods. Driven by the America COMPETES Act signed by President Obama in 2011, HHS has become one of the leading federal agencies to utilize the challenge mechanism to enable participation from innovators both within and outside of government. In recognition of the important role that challenges can play as an innovative mechanism for procuring new types of solutions from a broad range of solvers, the Department recently hired a Manager for Open Innovation to oversee the HHS challenge portfolio and established an HHS Competes Pathway. This quantitative measure will be based on metrics tracked in the Open Innovation Manager's database. Additional information which is relevant to understanding this metric is the types of challenges and number of solutions developed by HHS Operating divisions, the percentage of divisions utilizing challenges, and examples of successful challenges and results. In FY 2014, HHS issued 16 challenge competitions. We expect that number to nearly double in FY 2015. Some of initiatives being undertaken to increase the number of high-quality challenges issued by HHS include: 1) Launch of a new HHS Competes Ambassadors group that serve as points of contact within the HHS agencies, and steer the program forward by discussing policy and process issues, as well as effective prize design; 2) Development of a strategic sourcing mechanism and guidance for those who wish to hire a challenge management firm to assist with the running of challenges; and 3) a bi-weekly newsletter that highlights exciting new challenges being issued by HHS as well as non-HHS agencies. The bi-weekly newsletter has a readership of over 300 individuals, and is expected to grow during FY 2015.

In recognition of the important role that innovation plays within the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of the Deputy Secretary has established the Innovation, Design, Entrepreneurship and Action (IDEA) Lab to equip and empower HHS employees and members of the public who have an idea and want to act. This quantitative measure captures the number of submissions to HHS pathways. Current pathways include HHS Innovates (celebrating HHS trailblazers), HHS Entrepreneurs (pairing internal ideas with external expertise), HHS Innovator-in-Residence (solving shared problems through partnerships), HHS Ignite (incubating new ideas), and HHS Ventures (accelerating proven concepts). Over time additional pathways may be added. Additional information which is relevant to evaluating this metric is the percent of OPDIVs participating in the pathways and the number of projects selected within each pathway. A description of each of the pathways and examples of the resultant projects can be found on the IDEA Lab website. In FY 2014, there were 157 innovative projects submitted to the HHS IDEA Lab. We expect that number to grow in FY 2015. The HHS IDEA Lab is undertaking a number of initiatives to strengthen its various pathways and improve the types projects submitted. For example, The HHS Innovates Awards program has undergone restructuring to enhance the submission categories and mechanisms for rewarding innovative projects. The HHS Ignite program has moved to a bi-annual model, and now includes a training "bootcamp" for all participants. The HHS Innovator-in-Residence program now includes 2 external entrepreneurs working on distinct projects. The HHS IDEA Lab has hired a new Communications Director and expects to expand significantly its outreach about its pathways to HHS employees in FY2015.

Objective Progress Update Summary

HHS demonstrated progress toward this objective as shown by the representative performance measures described in the HHS Annual Performance Plan and Report. Further evidence of progress is described below.

• In November of 2012, ACF established an official Evaluation Policy. This Policy builds on ACF's strong history of evaluation work by outlining key principles to govern planning, conduct, and use of evaluation. It reconfirms ACF's commitment to conducting rigorous, relevant evaluations and to using evidence from evaluations to inform policy and practice.
• AHRQ’s TeamSTEPPS patient safety training program has spread to health care systems across all 50 states, now reaching an estimated 30 percent of U.S. hospitals, including small critical access hospitals. To date, over 8,000 master trainers have received TeamSTEPPS training through AHRQ and Department of Defense. TeamSTEPPS master trainers have, on average, trained an additional 50 front line health care professionals each for an estimated national grand total of over 350,000 health care professionals. TeamSTEPPS is in use in over 1,500 hospitals in the United States and 156 military treatment facilities worldwide. To meet the growing demand for master trainers, AHRQ launched an online version of the TeamSTEPPS training in April 2014.
• ASPR is creating a dataset that will link, at the individual level, administrative claims data from Medicare & Medicaid with administrative claims data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Energy and data from the U.S. Census. This dataset will facilitate and speed research by providing a critical research resource both for this event and for future events; promote efficiency by eliminating duplicative investigator efforts to link relevant databases, or request the same information from federal administrative claims offices; reduce research costs by funding a single resource that can be utilized by multiple investigators; and allow for multidisciplinary research teams to be developed with the data analytic capabilities necessary to perform this work and streamline use of data.
• MicrobeNet is a web-based microbial information platform designed by CDC as a modular system to incorporate multiple data types from laboratory and field testing of human, animal, and environmental samples to assist in the identification of biologic threats and zoonotic pathogens. MicrobeNet went live on January 1, 2013, and as of October 2013, the system processed approximately 1,000 searches for state health labs. Because MicrobeNet enables multiple analyses of a new or rapidly emerging pathogen to be performed in state and local labs, it dramatically decreases reporting time from weeks to days or hours. Laboratory scientists throughout the world can run diagnostic tests and match results against unique or rare isolates in CDC’s reference collection through a single interactive portal curated by CDC.
• ONC continues to provide leadership to the health care industry through nation-wide strategic health IT planning, maintaining the Electronic Health Record Certification Program and Certified Health IT Product List, and through a robust portfolio of prizes and challenges designed to motivate development of innovative solutions to health care problems.