The botched rollout of the healthcare.gov insurance exchange prompted the Obama administration to reassess how the federal government builds and manages information systems. One result was the creation of the U.S. Digital Service in August 2014 to recruit top IT talent for government IT projects.
“Think of it as DARPA [the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency] meets the Peace Corps meets SEAL Team Six,” said Todd Park, former CTO of the federal government who now is a Silicon Valley-based technology advisor to the White House.
“We want to drive the federal government to a place where the government can build world-class digital services, including veterans’ healthcare,” Park told MedCity News Monday at the annual Health Datapalooza in Washington. Minutes earlier, he had appealed to the health IT innovation community to consider joining the USDS for tours of duty lasting year or two.
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Today, the service has recruited about 140 participants, and the goal is to have 500 people in place by the end of 2016. It will be impossible for the federal government to match the high salaries of Silicon Valley or other technology centers, but Park said he hopes to sell a select number of people on the idea of public service.
Much of the work will be in healthcare. To date, the nascent USDS has provided support to the relaunched healthcare.gov, coordinated global data requests during the Ebola outbreak last fall and worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs to improve IT services in the wake of a scandal involving VA wait times.
Among the members of the service is Kathy Pham, a health data specialist who previously worked at Google and IBM, according to the White House website.
Photo: HDI Forum.
