TECHNOLOGY AND THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT

The Veterans Affairs Department doesn't plan to turn on for at least another month a system that exchanges information in veterans' electronic health records with the Defense Department, Roger Baker, VA's chief information officer told me.

Earlier this month, VA shut down its side of the Bidirectional Health Information Exchange (BHIE) with Defense because of a software glitch that resulted in VA clinicians getting bum patient information.

The problem surfaced when a VA doctor accessed the Defense's AHLTA electronic health record system to check prescription data on a female patient. That record showed a Defense physician had prescribed her an erectile dysfunction drug.

This obvious error led VA to issue a patient safety alert and Baker ordered BHIE to be shutdown.

VA has fixed that particular bug, but another one has surfaced, based on anecdotal reports from VA clinicians, Baker said. Department doctors have reported that sometimes when they access patient information through the BHIE interface, they will receive a full list of medications and lab reports but at other times just a truncated list.

Baker said to detect this anomaly, he needs to build a test environment that can replicate the real world conditions. This will require purchase of additional hardware and extensive testing, which by his best estimates will take at least a month.

Since patient safety is paramount at VA, Baker said the decision was made to not turn on BHIE until the tests are completed. Meanwhile, Veterans Affairs will get patient information from Defense the old fashioned way: by phone and fax.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has kicked off a research project to develop systems imbued with something that only exists in the animal kingdom: visual intelligence. The name of the project? The Mind's Eye.

Humans, DARPA says, can perform a range of visual tasks with ease, such as discerning the difference between objects and the scenes around them, well as the fine movements of the objects. Humans also possess a powerful ability to manipulate mentally imagined scenes to solve problems.

DARPA said it wants to develop a smart camera that possess the same abilities, which it figures would fit well on a range of surveillance gadgets, and wants to install the gizmo on a portable unmanned ground vehicle.

The Army plans to field portable, unmanned ground vehicles to all its infantry brigades as part of its modernization plans, but today soldiers operate them with controllers much like those used for Xbox video games.

Anyone with experience in cognitive systems, machine vision and related fields interested in visual intelligence development should show up at 1 pm on April 20 for the Mind's Eye industry day at the Washington Marriott in Washington.

You must register online by April 16.

Television viewers in the former Soviet republic of Georgia thought for a few panicky moments on March 13 that the country had come under attack by Russia for the second time since 2008.

A prime time news report on the Georgian Imedi TV channel showed Russian troops and tanks surging over the border and Russian planes bombing the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.

The channel then switched to the White House, with a shot of President Obama standing next to Vice President Joe Biden. An announcer explained the president was calling for an end to Russian aggression.

But, as my favorite London newspaper The Independent, explained, this was an ill-conceived simulation. The announcer on Imedi explained it was a simulation at the beginning of the broadcast, as well as at the end -- but not during the broadcast. Any Georgian who tuned in after the brief announcement at the beginning thought their country was under attack. The Independent reported:

As the report aired, panicked Georgians called friends and relatives. Mobile phone networks crashed for several minutes, and there were reports of cinemas emptying as frantic parents called their children back home. Local news agencies reported an increased number of calls to the emergency services from people suffering heart attacks.

About the only person who would have appreciated this stunt is Orson Welles, if he were still alive. He managed to panic much of the United States on Halloween in 1938 with his "War of the Worlds" broadcast, which used simulated, but realistic, news broadcasts to depict a not-so-obviously imaginary Martian attack.

The Pentagon will end up paying Lockheed Martin Corp. between $95 million and $131 million for each next generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet -- or 60 percent to 90 percent more than the original advertised sticker price.

But that hefty tab will not include fire extinguishers.

Of course, an advanced jet does not use fire extinguishers. The F-35 was supposed to have fire suppression systems, which, for the most part, were eliminated to save weight and cost, according to J. Michael Gilmore the Defense Department's director of operational test and evaluation at Defense.

Gilmore told a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that the F-35 program office decided to cut costs and shave weight by eliminating the systems in all areas of the aircraft (except the engines).

The office also eliminated another fire-safety gadget: fuses on fuel hydraulic lines. Together the two omissions have increased the threat of fire if the plane is hit by an ordinance in combat. They also make the F-35 "more vulnerable to typical noncombat fires caused by fuel leaks and other system failures," Gilmore told the committee.

Gilmore testified that he remains "concerned regarding the aircraft's vulnerability to threat-induced and safety-related fires."

I have asked the Air Force and the Pentagon how much money it saved by eliminating the fire suppression systems on a project that will now cost $323 billion for 2,450 aircraft. I have not heard back.

At that whopping price tag, one would hope money could be found to provide F-35s with a factory installed fire suppression system, because I don't think there are many aftermarket suppliers.

Maybe the Pentagon should eliminate the power windows and door locks, too.

I'm picking up strong signals that the Veterans Affairs Department has yet to fix the bug in its electronic health data exchange with the Defense Department and may not until next week rather than on March 9 as predicted.

The bug, which resulted in a VA doctor accessing erroneous patient information -- a prescription for an erectile dysfunction drug was in a record of a female patient -- evidently is taking longer to fix than originally anticipated.

VA promises to fill me in on March 15.