Todd Park Appointment to Federal CTO

We have followed Todd Park now since he cashed in his millions and accepted the challenge to help HHS move into this century with their technology. He has been the Chief Technology Officer for HHS since August 10, 2009. On Friday he will accept yet another challenge. Last week President Obama appointed Todd as the nation’s second federal Chief Technology Officer to succeed Aneesh Chopra.

An outsider and a successful innovator in the health IT arena, Park co-founded the EHR vendor athenaHealth with current CEO Jonathan Bush. Like Obama, he shares the “only in America is my story possible”. In the 60s, his father emigrated from rural South Korea became a chemical engineer and received 72 patents. Park’s entrepreneurial spirit, connections with the private sector, energy, vision, and technical know how were just a few of the things that made him successful. You can see some of his efforts in HealthCare.gov and HealthData.gov.

So he is moving from innovating information and technology to improve America’s health to promoting technology innovation to help achieve the nation’s most urgent priorities. And of course one of those priority areas won’t be a stretch, reducing health care costs and access to affordable health care. On the other fronts the admistration’s ambitious technology agenda priorities include job creation, energy efficiency, open government, and national security.

After appointing Todd to his new position, President Obama said that “Todd Park has demonstrated a remarkable talent for enlisting innovative technologies to modernize government, reduce waste and make government information more accessible to the public. In his new position he will bring those skills to the entire Federal enterprise, ensuring that government will serve all Americans fairly, effectively, and efficiently.”

As always, we wish him well in his new position and will continue to follow him.
Read his blog.
Follow him on Twitter.
Read about his talk at SXSW this past week on start ups.