By Matthew Holt
Todd Park is definitely one of health care IT’s good guys. Todd was the brains (though not the mouth!) behind athenahealth. After he left athenahealth, he spent a year back in California doing angel investing (Ventana among others) and being a dad. But despite his desire to stay on the west coast, he was dragged into the vortex known as Washington DC, and for the last 5 months he’s been the (first) CTO of HHS. (By the way, he cashed out his investments, and politely turned down my proposal to “care for” his cash while he was being a public servant!)
Todd gave the keynote yesterday at the Health IT Summit for Government Leaders. He describes his job as unlocking HHS’ “inner mojo” in terms of data use and technology innovation. So what are the big deals he sees? These are my notes on his fast talking!
1) HITECH/ARRA is not about for paying for software. Its purpose is to incentivize “meaningful use”. He wants to make sure that people understand that the NHIN (National Health Information Network) is not a thing. It’s a set of policies and services that people can use to make health data work over the Internet. It is NOT a parallel network. And at the end of the day, what’s going to make this work is the private sector — including vendors modifying their products to match these policies.
2) Leveraging the power of HHS data for public good. The amount of data HHS has is “ridiculous”. It has a set of sets of data. Todd is a paid up member of Tim Berners-Lee “free the data” club. They’re adding all kinds of data sets to data.gov including every grant, patent et al licensed/paid for by HHS. Todd calls this “data liberation”. They’re also creating community health maps where data on community health performance can be mashed up with other types of maps (real estate, job listings, et al). In addition, they’re doing “smart targeting” — an attempt to combine findings from different/disparate data sets without waiting to do the big database integration. He’s hoping to use techniques that the intelligence community uses to link, say, emails and bank wires, to similarly track, say, disease outbreaks, drug interactions, etc.
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