Todd Park Named US CTO – Is that Good of Bad for Health IT?

Thew news came out today that Todd Park has been appointed the new CTO of United States. Todd will be replacing Aneesh Chopra who recently left that position and went back to work at The Advisory Group. If you’ve had the chance to see Todd Park and Aneesh Chopra speak, you can see that they are cut from the same cloth. I’m not sure if that was a byproduct of working so much together or something else, but I’m sure Todd will carry forth the banner that Aneesh started.

Here’s one section of the announcement about Todd Park as US CTO

I’m very excited that President Obama today is appointing Todd Park as the new U.S. Chief Technology Officer, with the important task of applying the newest technology and latest advances to make the Federal government work better for the American people.

For nearly three years, Todd has served as CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he was a hugely energetic force for positive change. He led the successful execution of an array of breakthrough initiatives, including the creation of HealthCare.gov, the first website to provide consumers with a comprehensive inventory of public and private health insurance plans available across the Nation by zip code in a single, easy-to-use tool.

I think this is a good thing for healthcare IT. I think that Aneesh likely spent a bit more time on healthcare IT than another person without the healthcare background would have spent. I expect we’ll see Todd Park do the same. Plus, I think Todd Park really loves so many of the projects that he was working on as CTO of HHS.

The next question is, who do you think will replace Todd Park as CTO of HHS?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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