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The Department of Health and Human Services can now use real-time data from its acquisition shop to buy things faster, and more economically, using a blockchain and artificial intelligence tool called HHS Accelerate.
Jose Arrieta, deputy assistant secretary for the acquisition, declared Friday to the federal news network that HHS Accelerate, having obtained the authorization to operate (ATO) on Monday, will draw current data from five systems of contract writing and about 100,000 contracts representing almost $ 25 billion of annual spending. The data will be updated every 24 hours.
"We believe there are significant savings and significant price negotiating power that will come with full visibility of the prices paid," Arrieta said Friday.
When agencies want to make a strategic purchase of something, Arrieta said it can take months to collect all the data and analyze it.
"Now we have the opportunity to do that analysis in a second, and provide the information to the officer in charge of planning the negotiations or acquisitions," Arrieta said. "It's extremely powerful, it's like going to Target – let's say you're buying an iPhone – raise the price on Amazon and find it costs $ 30 less, show it to the Target cashier and get a discount. of the acquisition and empowerment of the contracting professional. "
While HHS Accelerate uses the taxonomy track of structured data, the tool also utilizes the automation of robotic processes and machine learning to automate some of the business processes.
"Machine learning actually cleans data as it comes from our legacy systems, and Blockchain becomes the reference point and the holder of taxonomy," Arrieta said.
Now that it is authorized to use real-time data, the HHS Accelerate team plans to make changes to the project.
"Once the company works properly, we must begin to share it with our workforce and get feedback from them on what is valuable and where we can provide analysis, analysis and focus," Arietta said.
By March 2019, HHS seems to have a working capacity that it can begin to use to provide information to the contracted workforce.
"This means extracting data from the writing systems, being able to analyze them and then pushing them to contract professionals and getting feedback from them on what information is useful, what information might be more useful, which ones are not useful and start to train # 39; automatic learning this way, "said Arrieta.
Next summer, before the end of the third quarter of fiscal year 2019, HHS plans to make a decision about when the agency will switch from one of its legacy systems, the departmental contract information system, at HHS acceleration.
"We think this will have no effect on the workforce," Arrieta said. "They will not even know that a change has occurred."
HHS Accelerate stands out as one of the projects developed by the Buy Smarter initiative of the agency.
Last month, Lori Ruderman, the co-star of the Buy Smarter initiative, predicted that the agency could save up to $ 720 million by identifying the lowest possible price for bulk purchases of items newspapers like paper and gloves for medical examinations.
