The Health and Human Services Department is looking to improve its acquisition processes and redundancies in departmentwide contracting by putting emerging technologies behind its data and the $24 billion it spends in goods and services each year.
That’s according to Lori Ruderman, Buy Smarter initiative lead and senior adviser at the HHS Program Support Center. Buy Smarter is how HHS is reimagining and transforming purchasing by adopting tech like artificial intelligence and analyzing department requirements on spend data to achieve lower prices and consolidate contract vehicles and requirements with HHS and, eventually, across the government.
“Buy Smarter is an innovative opportunity for HHS to … look at our category management, break down some stovepipes and consolidate our requirements across the board,” Ruderman said at the Jan. 29 AFCEA Health IT Summit in Bethesda, Maryland. Because within HHS, all its different operational and staff divisions buy many of the same items on separate contracts, duplicating efforts.
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While DoD spends billions annually on these defense agencies and DoD field activities to maintain business functions, it “does not comprehensively or routinely assess the continuing need” for them, according to a 
Jeff Lau, the acting regional commissioner for the Northeast and Caribbean region of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, says robotic process automation (RPA) could save the acquisition workforce from having to waste time on administrative “cutting and pasting” tasks.
“I’ve seen the workforce shrink over the last five-to-10 years. When I first started my career at GSA, there was a lot more opportunity to do training. Now we’re heads-down, doing the work, because if they’re not doing the work, who else is? I think there’s an opportunity for us to provide training with their freed-up time, to develop them into a more well-rounded acquisition workforce,” Lau said last week at an event sponsored by the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC).
