“The OIG at HHS has seen the amount of spending it oversees rise drastically during the pandemic. Before the pandemic, the OIG oversaw around $1 trillion in spending, but, between the CARES Act and subsequent COVID-19 relief bills, that number is now around $2.4 trillion, Renata Miskell, senior advisor to the Chief Data and Analytics Officer at HHS OIG, said at today’s event.
As far as how the office is leveraging tech to help with oversight, Miskell explained that most of their projects in that area fall under one of three categories: leveraging cloud to detect fraud, helping boots on the ground, or leveraging AI.
On the first use, Miskell said, ‘there are instances where that provider may be double-dipping, triple-dipping, or they might be inappropriately receiving those [PPP and other kinds of] funds and so what we did was leveraging our cloud platform, we’re able to bring in multiple data sources and sort of visualize. … Then we could apply our regular sort of fraud flags on those, or risk flags and help our investigators [and] auditors target … and look into those instances.’
The second use, Miskell noted, was similar to the USPS app, where HHS OIG utilized a mobile app for a program titled Operation Care. Operation Care sent inspectors to over 600 nursing homes and emergency medical service providers to quickly get data in about whether facilities had appropriate Personal Protective Equipment and were following the necessary COVID protocols.
On the AI front, Miskell noted the agency is using the technology to help flag grants, and her colleague Nicole Willis, the chief enterprise architect and director of architecture and transformation in the office of the CIO within HHS OIG, added the agency is also using robotic process automation (RPA) for processes like flagging social media keywords to help detect COVID-19 fraud…” Read the full article here.
Source: Fed OIGs Leveraging Technology to Adjust to Pandemic Landscape – By Lamar Johnson, April 14, 2021. MeriTalk.
