PSRA Federal Retirement Support

¡Ejército lanza campaña de ayuda financiera para soldados y retirados!

El Ejército ha lanzado una campaña para informar y brindar asistencia financiera a soldados en servicio activo, retirados y sus familias. El programa cubre emergencias como viajes imprevistos, desastres naturales, reparaciones del hogar, equipos médicos y otros gastos esenciales.

A partir del 17 de marzo de 2025, se implementará un portal en línea para agilizar el proceso de solicitud y aprobación de ayuda. Según Edwidg Pedre, especialista en preparación financiera, este programa es una herramienta clave para los líderes militares que buscan apoyar a sus tropas en tiempos de dificultad económica.

AER ha otorgado más de $2 millones en asistencia financiera en Puerto Rico, incluyendo $1.6 millones para afectados por huracanes María y Fiona. También ofrece becas educativas y apoyo económico para soldados y sus familias.

Source: NotiUno

Understanding the Process for Veteran Compensation: A Comprehensive Guide.

Understanding the Process for Veteran Compensation: A Comprehensive Guide Introduction: Navigating Veteran Compensation For veterans who have served their country, accessing compensation for service-related disabilities is a crucial aspect of post-service life. Understanding the process and requirements for filing a claim with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is es...

Estados Unidos está sentado sobre la mayor pila de deuda pública de su historia, y los economistas se están poniendo nerviosos al respecto.

El creciente saldo de deuda del gobierno plantea problemas para la economía estadounidense. Estos incluyen una mayor inflación, una mayor volatilidad del mercado y una menor calidad de vida para los estadounidenses. Ralentizar el ritmo de endeudamiento es fundamental para el futuro, dijeron los economistas a Business Insider.

El saldo de la deuda federal alcanzó los 34 billones de dólares este año, y el gobierno está en camino de acumular otro billón de dólares en deuda cada 100 días, según una estimación de Bank of America.

¿Por qué es tan preocupante?
La montaña de deuda es un abono para los problemas económicos, incluida una mayor inflación, una menor calidad de vida y, en el peor de los casos, una desestabilización del sistema financiero en general, según Les Rubin, un veterano de los mercados que ha calificado la situación de la deuda de Estados Unidos como uno de los "mayores esquemas Ponzi" del mundo.

Es fundamental que Estados Unidos venda su deuda a los inversores, que van desde instituciones, particulares y otros países. Pero los niveles más altos de deuda ponen en duda si Estados Unidos podrá cumplir sus promesas de seguir pagándolo, y cuanto más dude la gente en comprar los títulos de deuda de Estados Unidos, más se perjudica la economía, dice Rubin.

"Lo que pasaría si no podemos vender la deuda es que terminemos con una incapacidad para funcionar como economía. El gobierno sobrevive de la deuda. Si literalmente no pudiéramos vender nuestra deuda, no podríamos pagar nuestras facturas", dijo Rubin a Business Insider en una entrevista.

La deuda en sí misma es inherentemente inflacionaria, lo que significa que los consumidores pueden esperar precios más altos si el gobierno no reduce su endeudamiento.

Fuente: Business Insider

Leaders on the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board saw 2023 as a relatively successful year of progressing toward long-term strategic goals for the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). Perhaps most notably, more TSP participants than ever are now contributing enough to their retirement accounts to receive a full match from the government.

Currently, 86.8% of feds in the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS), as well as 84.9% of active-duty military members in the Blended Retirement System (BRS) are putting at least 5% of their biweekly paychecks into the TSP. Contributing at least 5% to the TSP is the amount required to receive the maximum 5% matching contribution from an employee’s agency or a military member’s branch of service.

Additionally, the TSP now has $845 billion in total assets — another record-high for the government’s 401(k)-sequel retirement savings program for federal employees. And setting yet another record, 36% of the now roughly 7 million total TSP participants have Roth balances. “These numbers tell me that 7 million current and former federal employees in both civilian and uniformed services have trusted us with $845 billions of their hard-earned money,” Ravi Deo, executive director of the FRTIB, said during a board meeting Tuesday. “It is a trust we must continue to earn.”

Jim Courtney, director of FRTIB’s Office of Communications and Education, has credited the growing number of participants who receive the full matching rate to the FRTIB’s switch in 2020 to auto-enroll participants at a 5% contribution rate, rather than the previous 3%.

The improvements during 2023 also show progress in the goals FRTIB set in its strategic plan for fiscal 2022 through 2026. For the past couple of years, the board has been aiming to provide more information to participants to help them make the most informed decisions possible about their investments and retirement savings.

One of the steps toward the strategic goal is encouraging best practices for savings, FRTIB said, including contributing enough to receive a full matching rate.

“TSP funds, when combined with regular savings and an employer match, can improve retirement security for millions of families with a TSP participant in their ranks,” Deo said. “And the $845 billion [in total assets] does have one big benefit — it allows us to provide our services at an extremely low cost, allowing our participants to keep more of their money.”

Over the last year, the FRTIB also learned of slight changes in participants’ views of their own financial wellness, and their confidence in their goals for retirement savings.

Currently, a little over half of TSP participants are confident they are on track for retirement, according to a survey the FRTIB conducted during June and July 2023.

The last time FRTIB conducted a financial wellness survey was in 2020. In the past couple of years, participants who are still employed but who have separated from public service have become noticeably less confident in their retirement goals.

“What do we do now that we have this great information from our folks?” Bilyeu said during the board meeting. “What do we do to create action plans in the next year, two years, five years — however we’re going to do it — to address those areas that they feel most vulnerable?”

Tom Brandt, FRTIB’s chief risk officer and director of planning and risk, said the goal is to use the survey and new information when considering any changes, decision-making and communications going forward.

“It’s also used by the training team as they’re looking at what additional training might be appropriate, or perhaps when we want to make some adjustments,” Brandt said. “As we look through this data, we can see some areas where there might be some benefits from making some adjustments, making some enhancements, or perhaps adding some new components to our training and communication elements.”

In addition to improving communications and resources for FERS participants in the TSP, the board is also trying to adjust the way it reaches younger military members who are newly enrolled in BRS.

“They’re young, they’re transient, they’re hard to find,” Brandt said. “They have the hardest time at that age imagining retirement.”

The BRS is a relatively new retirement system, which many military members got access to as part of the fiscal 2016 National Defense Authorization Act. BRS offers a “blend” of two major sources of retirement income: a traditional retirement pension and a TSP account.

In addition to automatic enrollment into the BRS for new military members, TSP ensures that participants are enrolled at the 5% matching rate, and that they’re enrolled in the right lifecycle (L) fund for their age. In September 2023, for the first time since the launch of the BRS program in 2018, the number of BRS participants surpassed the number of participants in the military’s legacy retirement system.

Similar to the FRTIB’s goals for FERS participants, the board tries to communicate and inform BRS enrollees as much as possible.

The Defense Department “has identified 14 milestones in the career of a uniformed services person — touch points where they have to teach them something,” Brandt said. “We make sure that our TSP materials are part of those touch points.”

Deo said while enrollment in the BRS is certainly not the end of military members’ savings toward retirement, it’s a step in the right direction of trying to create good habits early on.

“To the extent that we can take someone who is spending 12 hours a day figuring out how they get really good at something that is completely unrelated to the TSP — whether it’s Army, Navy, Air Force — we stick them in automatically, we give them the match,” Deo said. “If they do nothing, they will reach the age of 22 better off than most 22-year-olds in America … We are — hopefully — pushing the boulder down the hill and we will continue to roll fast.”

Fresh off a 5% pay raise, federal employees can look forward to some other enhancements coming their way, like the possibility of another hefty pay raise next year. For more on this and a few other matters, the Federal Drive with Tom spoke with John Hatton, the vice president for Policy and Programs at the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE).

Interview:

Tom Temin -And let’s talk about the FAIR Act federal pay rate increase for 2025. This is kind of a perennial where they look for not double digits but high single digits.

John Hatton -Yeah. And so, this is kind of a marker for members of Congress pushing for federal pay raises. In this case, Congressman Gerry Connolly(D-Va.) in the House and Senator Schatz (D-Hawaii) in the Senate. And I would say this is more of a negotiating tool for them in terms of trying to put this marker down as you get into the appropriations season. So, the federal pay raise is typically based off of the most recent change in the employment cost index for private sector wages and salaries. So, if you’re looking at that ended in 2023, it’s 4.5%. That’s typically reduced down by half a percent down to four for that across the board pay increase. That’s probably what you’re going to expect to see in Biden’s budget. If they’re looking to keep that same pay rate policy going forward, that they include a certain amount in this case, in recent cases, 0.5% for locality pay. The Fair act says, let’s go a little bit higher on locality pay, there’s a large pay gap between federal employee pay, similar private sector jobs of 27%. So, they’re looking for a 3.4% increase in locality instead of that point five percentage point increase.

Tom Temin -And locality is spreading like wildfire in some sense to every year there are new regions. And you wonder how did that get to be a locality pay. It’s harder to find places that aren’t locality pay.

John Hatton -Yeah, there’s still this general breast of US locality pay, which actually also increases from the base to an extent different geographic areas continue to be above that, you’re going to have these new localities pay areas crop up. But certainly, in large metropolitan areas, whether it’s San Francisco or New York or in the DC area, people are paid more because the cost of living is higher, and wages are higher. So, it is good policy, I think, to adjust pay for what the market rate is in that area.

Tom Temin -And what is the latest thinking on whether federal employees are paid more or less than their counterparts in the private sector? I’ve always felt that, yes, some of them are underpaid. Some of them are actually better than the private sector. I don’t think there’s any single index that makes any sense because of the range of jobs involved.

John Hatton -Yeah, what the federal government uses is the Federal Salary Council. And they try to match job to job, similar private sector jobs with the federal jobs and come up with some percentage difference, which is supposed to inform the changes in locality pay. And they found that taking that all in aggregate, there’s a 27% difference where the private sector gets paid more than federal jobs. Now, that’s not taking into account benefits. The Congressional Budget Office has looked at this before, they look at less of a job-to-job comparison and more of a human capital approach. So, people with similar experience, people of similar educational backgrounds and what are they getting paid? And they find kind of the most educated in the federal workforce are paid less than their private sector counterparts. But if you get down to the lower educational levels, they’re actually paid a little bit more when you’re taking into account benefits and everything else. So, depends on how you’re analyzing it, it’s complicated, but I think certainly there are plenty of cases where pay needs to go up to be competitive with the private sector in recruitment.

Tom Temin -And in the last couple of years, you’ve probably noticed, as we have, that lots of agencies are getting spot authority to offer extra pay, extra benefits, extra hiring eases for strategically important jobs they might need. It’s fairly widespread, though.

John Hatton -Yeah, I think that’s one of the justifications for the Fair Act or trying to close that locality pay gap is how much agencies are pushing for these special pay authorities so that they can actually recruit people, because what is being provided under the basic or general schedule system isn’t enough. So, I don’t know if any one year that locality pay increase is going to be 27%, but little inches of work would help prevent kind of these situations where agencies are really struggling to recruit people because their pay is low.

Tom Temin -Especially in an age when a pack of potato chips at the grocery store is five bucks. We’re speaking with John Hatton, vice president for policy and programs at the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, NARFE. And the OPM data breach, this was back in 2015 kids, but it still resonates, doesn’t it? And there is something that would extend protection for people’s identities continuing. Tell us what’s going on there.

John Hatton -Yeah. So just as a reminder, people, OPM allowed their database to be breached and personally identifiable information was revealed. Now, Congress responded to that by providing identity theft protection up to $5 million in insurance, but only for like the next ten years when they include it in appropriations bill. So, there’s an effort to extend that information is out there hasn’t been put back in the box. So, people may still need that protection resulting from that breach. So, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC.) introduced a bill to extend it. I think this will probably get a little bit more attention as we get closer to that expiration date, but it’s just a reminder to people that, yes, your data still may be out there, you still may need some of this protection and it should be the obligation of the federal government which gave it away to provide you with that identity theft protection.

Tom Temin -The strange thing about that data is that it never did manifest itself in any obvious way. There wasn’t some big giant phishing attack that hit a million federal employees or anything. No one really knew what happened to it or where it went, or if it ever was used in some manner.

John Hatton -Yeah, I think it’s probably difficult to actually parse out whether, if you do have some identity theft or fraud attack on you, if it came from that OPM data breach or a target breach or something else, there’s data hacks all over the place. OPM is not the only place to be exposed in this realm, so I think the danger becomes when people can collect data from multiple sources and starts piecing together and piecing together, and they get a much clearer picture of you and your identity and how you operate the one piece of data or the one attack may not be itself the most, but certainly is relevant in this case.

Tom Temin -And the other thing about such data, it does go stale because people change jobs, they move and so forth. So, you got to act quick on it, especially if you’re going to launch a phishing attack based on what you know about that person at that moment.

John Hatton -True, and some of that is email addresses. But I think in this case you’re talking about Social Security numbers, CSA numbers, just identities and addresses. Now, if you’ve moved and certainly there was concerns about people who were in intelligence agencies, people whose identities has been protected based on their top-secret clearances or otherwise.

Tom Temin -And eventually you retire and then you worry about pharmacy benefits and Medicare Part D haven’t had the pleasure of navigating those shoals yet, but it’s complicated. But now there is a bipartisan bill that would help with Medicare Part D and drug costs.

John Hatton -Yeah. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability advanced a bill that applies the FEHB. That was their jurisdiction. This was also going through energy and commerce and ways and means as to take it up as well. And it’s just an effort, and it’s nice to see some bipartisanship on this issue of drug pricing. And that would apply to federal retirees through FEHB. And now that more plans are integrating with Medicare Part D through that as well, and just prohibit some practices like the PBMs, negotiate drug prices, and they may get rebates, but they may not pass that rebate on to you as a consumer or the insurance companies that you’re paying the premiums for those claims, they made insure you to different pharmacies so you can’t go to the pharmacy you want. So, some common sense legislation, getting at some drug pricing and getting at some of these practices that reduce your choice. So, it’s good to see some bipartisanship, even in the midst of a very partizan environment, that some business can still get done and some improvements can still be made.

Tom Temin -Yeah, that idea of the pharmacy benefits manager, I guess it had a good theory in that someone third party would argue with drug companies and get prices down, but it’s kind of turned into a profit center, almost, where the savings don’t necessarily get passed on to the actual buyer.

John Hatton -Right now, they have an incentive to negotiate and get lower prices, but they don’t have the incentive to necessarily pass that on to the consumer as thoroughly as they should or could.

PSRA Federal Retirement Support Somos un equipo a tu total disposición. Nuestra experiencia nos ha llevado a estar entre las principales compañías del mercado y siendo pioneros en el mercado federal.

The Department of the Navy is determined not to repeat its mistakes of 2013 the last time it faced massive budget cuts due to sequestration. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro has made it clear, time and again, that readiness will not suffer. Del Toro met with acquisition leadership yesterday to lay out how it will prioritize readiness over investments in new products. Russell Rumbaugh, the assistant secretary of the Navy for financial management and comptroller, said Thursday that the acquisition professionals heard some of the details about the steps the Navy would have to take if Congress doesn’t pass a full year budget.

Russell Rumbaugh is the assistant secretary of the Navy for financial management and comptroller. “Obviously, we’re still hoping this doesn’t happen. But it’s a little bit breathtaking when the Secretary has to sit there and hear the bad news delivered to his acquisition professionals,” Rumbaugh said after speaking at the ACT-IAC Digital Transformation Summit in Reston, Va. on Thursday. “Every time we go through these budget shenanigans, it makes everybody’s life harder. All of the fund's distributions are different. We have multiple ways that we may have to chop it up to make sure we stay within the controls that we’re stuck with because of a continuing resolution and to create a lapse, it’s even worse. There’s plenty of drama and turbulence no matter what.” The first of two current continuing resolutions expire March 1 for some agencies and March 8 for others. It’s unclear if Congress will even pass all spending bills and there is some discussion about a full-year CR.

The Congressional Budget Office reported in January that a full-year CR could require big cuts to agency discretionary budgets. Non-defense agencies would face a 5% or a total of $41 billion in cuts, while defense agencies would have to reduce their discretionary spending by about $1 billion or 1%. If Congress passes a full-year appropriations at current levels, only non-defense agencies would face cuts under sequestration of about 9% or $73 billion.

In December, the Office of Management and Budget said that cuts under sequestration would not be decided until later this spring. Navy to make readiness a priority. All of this uncertainty is leading the Navy to plan for the worst. Del Toro said at the AFCEA West conference in San Diego on Feb. 15 that the Navy may face a deficit of $40 billion without a full year budget. “While Congress has so far avoided a painful and disastrous government shutdown, a full-year continuing resolution would be monumentally damaging to our efforts to build and maintain the fleet of today — much less the fleet of the future,” Del Toro said. “Without a full budget, our safety and readiness will suffer, at a time when we are ill able to afford it—lost time in readiness cannot be bought back through future funding.”

Rumbaugh added that the cuts from sequestration in 2013 severely impacted the Navy’s readiness and a decade later, it is “still trying to dig out of that hole.” Other military services have rung similar alarm bells. The Air Force said a yearlong continuing resolution, estimating that the service would lose as much as $13 billion in buying power before adjusting for inflation. The Space Force would face the largest funding gap, losing nearly $2.6 billion in research dollars. The Air Force would lose up to $1.4 billion in research, test, development and evaluation dollars. It would have to cancel 34 construction projects, and the measure would impact seven national security space launches.

Sabrina Singh, the deputy press secretary for the Defense Department, said on Monday that a full-year CR would have a major impact on the services and defense agencies’ readiness. “No amount of money can buy back the time we lose when we are forced to operate under continuing resolutions,” Singh said. “If you add up the total time spent under a CR going back to 2011, we’ve spent nearly five years under CRs. That puts our national security at risk and prevents the department from modernizing as we continue to be constrained to existing funding levels and prevented from launching new programs. We must break this pattern of inaction. We can’t outcompete the People’s Republic of China with one hand tied behind our back three, four, five or even six months of every fiscal year. The best way that Congress can support the department is to pass appropriations bills into law as soon as possible. We need predictable, adequate, sustained and timely funding.”

Rumbaugh said both the potential funding shortfall and the focus on readiness over investment will have downstream effects on the Navy’s goal to become audit ready by 2028. He said the migration to the new enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is considered an investment. So, if the Navy is prioritizing readiness over investments, including new ships, all the progress the service has made over the last few years will slow down.

“By 2026, we want to shut off [the legacy system] SABERS for the Department of the Navy and be out of that and into our big ERP. The nitty gritty is taking a bunch of commands and moving them, and some of them do have unique financial transactions we haven’t dealt with before,” Rumbaugh said. “Other times it is a modern magnification. And most probably you just kind of take the people with you. They have to learn we’re asking a huge amount of them to not just do their day job but learn how to do their day job in a totally new environment. We are very sympathetic and very concerned about them even as we have to just do it.”

The Navy recently completed the migration of the Bureau of Personnel to the ERP. Rumbaugh said the Fleet Forces Command are among the final organizations that need to migrate and that will happen over the next few years. “Migrating them is in process. We’re just cleaning their data, which you won’t be surprised to hear is a fairly formidable challenge. But we’re in the process, I can see the end of this migration. It’s great,” he said. As a part of the ERP modernization effort, Rumbaugh said the Navy has retired 11 of 16 financial management systems, but a CR and/or sequestration would impact the service’s ability to shut down the remaining systems.

The Marines Corps already are well on their way to not only moving to a new system, but, hopefully, auditability. Rumbaugh said the Marines decided to move to Defense Agencies Initiative (DAI), a financial management modernization effort that doesn’t involve the services. “They’re all the way there on the financial management, and that does just address a huge number of problems,” he said. “There was still a bunch of side things we had to do, but that migration, that huge cultural change, which was absolutely turbulent, absolutely painful, they are through, and in fact, I think, now healing from it.”

Source: Federal News Network

PSRA Federal Retirement Support Somos un equipo a tu total disposición. Nuestra experiencia nos ha llevado a estar entre las principales compañías del mercado y siendo pioneros en el mercado federal.

WASHINGTON — Today, the U.S. Postal Service announced dates and locations for several stamp releases between April and June 2024. This is a partial list, with more to be revealed in the weeks and months ahead.

Details on first day-of-issue cities/ceremony locations for other 2024 stamps will be released throughout the year. Dates and locations may be subject to change.

Customers may purchase stamps and other philatelic products through the Postal Store at usps.com/shop stamps, by calling 844-737-7826, by mail through USA Philatelic or at select Post Office locations nationwide. For officially licensed stamp products, shop the USPS Officially Licensed Collection on Amazon.

The United States Postal Service is an independent federal establishment, mandated to be self-financing and to serve every American community through the affordable, reliable and secure delivery of mail and packages to 167 million addresses six and often seven days a week. Overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, the Postal Service is implementing a 10-year transformation plan, delivering for America, to modernize the postal network, restore long-term financial sustainability, dramatically improve service across all mail and shipping categories, and maintain the organization as one of America’s most valued and trusted brands.

The Postal Service generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.

Source: USPS

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) sees artificial intelligence tools as a way to provide a higher level of care to veterans, while reducing administrative tasks and burnout among its employees.

VA has identified over 100 AI use cases so far. VA Chief Technology Officer Charles Worthington told members of the House VA Committee last week that 40 of them are in an “operational phase,” and being put to use in the field. “The department believes that AI represents a generational shift in how our computer systems will work, and what they will be capable of. If used well, AI has the potential to empower VA employees to provide better health care, faster benefits decisions, and more secure systems,” Worthington told the health subcommittee on Feb. 15.

AI use cases put into practice include an AI model called REACH-VET, designed to predict the veterans who are most at risk of su***de. Worthington said this information impacts what VA providers prescribe when seeing at-risk patients, and how they follow up with them. Worthington said the VA also used natural language processing (NLP) as “customer experience listening,” to comb through feedback and comments submitted by patients. “Occasionally, those comments will indicate that this veteran might be at risk or need help. Maybe they are indicating that they are having homeless problems,” Worthington said. “So, this NLP model can flag comments that might be particularly concerning for follow-up by a professional that can read the comment themselves and decide if some other action is warranted.”

Assistant Under Secretary for Health Carolyn Clancy said the VA is developing AI predictive tools to identify which veterans are likely to do well after initial treatment for prostate cancer, and which are likely to need more frequent monitoring. Clancy said the VA is particularly focused on “augmented intelligence” use cases of AI that improve the productivity and effectiveness of VA clinicians. “In other words, the human in the loop is quite important,” Clancy said. She added that the VA is trying “to balance benefits while being very, very attentive to risks.” Worthington said the VA’s Trustworthy AI Framework, adopted in July 2023, gave the VA “a critical head starts on developing policies to govern our use of AI in production.”

Worthington said VA expects to update its strategy in the coming year to reflect the pace of this emerging technology. “Over the past several years, VA has created the foundational guardrails it needs when considering AI tools have a significant potential to improve veteran health care and benefits,” Worthington said.

Clancy told lawmakers that the VA is in the “middle of the pack, or possibly even further up than that,” when it comes to AI adoption in U.S. health care. “No system yet has put out in public or has figured out how to take all these steps in a very, very careful way — to balance benefits while being very, very attentive to risks and so forth,” she said. “I think there’s a fair amount of caution all around. But I would expect, by virtue of our size that, in many ways, we may actually be in the lead, which would be a good place to be.”

VA in October launched an AI Tech Sprint, which focuses on how VA can address provider burnout by providing AI dictation tools to take notes during medical appointments. It also looks at how AI can extract information from paper medical records. “By investing in these projects, VA aims to learn how AI technologies could assist VA clinical staff in delivering better health care with less clerical work, enabling more meaningful interactions between clinicians and veterans,” Worthington said.

The VA launched its AI Tech Sprint as part of the AI executive order President Joe Biden signed last October, calling federal agencies to step up their use of this emerging technology. Subcommittee Chairwoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) said AI creates possibilities to improve diagnostic accuracy, predict and mitigate patient risk and identify interventions earlier — as well as the administrative burden on employees.

“While AI holds great promise, the reality is that it is a new, developing technology, and we are still figuring out what is possible and practical and ethical,” Miller-Meeks said. Subcommittee Ranking Member Julia Brownley (D-Calif.) said the VA, as the largest health care provider in the country, will serve as a model for the implementation of AI at other health care systems, “which makes it all the more important that we ensure VA and other AI users establish best practices, procedures, and guard rails early on in the implementation.”

“Even as we find productive ways for AI to be implemented, we must take measures to ensure VA is continuing to robustly hire, retain — and I will emphasize retain — and protect its clinical workforce,” Brownley said.

David Newman-Toker, director of the Armstrong Center for Diagnostic Excellence at Johns Hopkins University, said VA’s health care data environment “is better suited than most” to delivering high-quality data that might train AI systems. “The rate-limiting step for developing and implementing AI systems in health care is no longer the technology,” he said. “It is the sources of data on which the technology must be trained,” Newman-Toker said.

Newman-Toker said the VA’s data advantage includes a “commitment to health care quality and safety,” a unified health record offering greater potential for standardizing data capture and a patient population that tends to stay within the VA system. “These attributes give the VA the opportunity to take a leading role in building high-quality AI systems,” he said. Meanwhile, Technology Modernization Subcommittee Chairman Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), however, is urging the VA to notify veterans when their health or personal information is fed into an AI model.

“The problem that I see is that you are literally putting the cart before the horse,” Rosendale said. “You are utilizing AI, and you are not disclosing it to the veterans. You are not giving them a choice. And that is dangerous." Worthington said that at the VA, “protecting veterans’ data is pretty much job one, especially in the Office of Information and Technology.” “I think we are lucky that we have a lot of existing policies around how veterans’ data can be used and how it can’t be used,” he said.

Source: Federal news Network

PSRA Federal Retirement Support Somos un equipo a tu total disposición. Nuestra experiencia nos ha llevado a estar entre las principales compañías del mercado y siendo pioneros en el mercado federal.