It looks like U.S. CTO Todd Park is headed back west to the Silicon Valley after five years with the administration, starting with his role as CTO for the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s reported to be taking on a new role in the administration to recruit more technology experts to run federal websites. In particular, his legacy will be associated with opening up more government data to the public. The Advisory Board Company’s blog highlighted a few of them.
Health Data Initiative came out of the HHS and involves publishing new HHS data for public access, putting existing data into a format that makes it more easily readable or accessible, and giving the public a heads up on when it becomes available. It includes community health data, provider directories and patient satisfaction data. It has led to more than 1,000 data sets hosted on HealthData.gov
Adding transparency to government data In addition to athenahealth, Park co-founded Castlight Health, which is about providing more price transparency to help people make more informed decisions about medical procedures. That push for transparency also became part of healthcare initiatives in DC. In a bid to add more transparency to government data and to produce more useful applications and research, Park implemented OpenFDA, a platform to boost access to public health data for researchers, health IT developers and consumers. The first data sets were for adverse events associated with medication. Although not a perfect solution, the initiative was a positive step.
A Personalized Approach to Medication Nonadherence
At the Abarca Forward conference earlier this year, George Van Antwerp, managing director at Deloitte, discussed how social determinants of health and a personalized member experience can improve medication adherence and health outcomes.
The Open FDA initiative also included the creation of the Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation at the FDA along with the chief health informatics officer post filled by Dr. Taha Kass-Hout. The plan is to expand the pilot to include the FDA’s databases on product recalls and product labeling.
HealthCare.gov Although Park participated in fixing the federal government’s website and its problems, the website was continually dogged by having no single point person for accountability. That made it more difficult to credit individuals for its successes and easier for critics to spread around blame for its failures. It’s probably no coincidence that only a few days after news broke of his imminent departure that a CEO for HealthCare.gov, Kevin Counihan, has been appointed. Counihan previously led Connecticut’s health insurance exchange.
Park also created a permanent set of innovation fellows in a program that works on technology projects.
