HHS chief technology officer wants to revolutionize the health care industry

Todd Park genuinely intended to retire.

At the age of 24, he'd co-founded what would become a thriving health care technology company called Athenahealth, and nearly 10 years later he made a fortune when the company went public with a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion. His wife Amy, who he'd met when he was at Harvard, had long wanted a husband who wasn't glued to his career seven days a week, and the couple had been putting off having a child. The two moved from Boston to California in 2008 and Amy gave birth to a son that same year. Though Park was, in theory, retired at this point, he continued to invest and work with health care technology startups. But with these new companies he had a more hands-off approach, meaning he wasn't heavily involved in their day-to-day activities. At 36, it looked as if he'd put much of his entrepreneurial work behind him and would spend the rest of his days as a family man and passive investor.

The first sign that this scenario wouldn't play out came when, in June of 2009, he received an email from Bill Corr, the deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. "It said, 'We'd like to talk to you about becoming chief technology officer of HHS,'" Park told me during an interview in his HHS office last month. "I always wanted to meet Bill, and so if he asks to meet with you, you don't say no. But I thought I'd learn more about what he was looking for and help him find the right person, because basically if we moved back from California to the east coast, and I jumped from the life I was living into the 24/7 startup life again, my wife would behead me. She had been waiting a long time to have a husband and have a dad for our kid."

But Corr was what Park described as a "cordial and lethal sales person," and at his office, he began to lay out the framework of this brand new position opening at HHS. First and foremost, Corr explained, this position wouldn't be heading the IT of all of HHS; the agency already had people for that task. Instead, the CTO position would focus entirely on being an "entrepreneur in residence." Earlier that year, President Obama, on his first day in office, had signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, which would usher in "a new era of open and accountable government meant to bridge the gap between the American people and their government." The idea was to force government agencies to engage in radical transparency, a move that would include opening up its vast treasure troves of data and funneling it through APIs so that private citizens and businesses could build apps and tools that could leverage the data.

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