Former U.S. CTO on government as innovation platform

BOSTON—The digital health revolution will happen this decade, Aneesh Chopra, co-founder and executive vice president of Hunch Analytics and former U.S. chief technology officer, told an audience at the Digital Healthcare Innovation Summit.

“If you combine incentive rules with the opening of data, everyone will be able to pitch their wares and plug them right into our systems,” he said.

Chopra previously served for a decade at The Advisory Board Company where he researched how internet-based technologies can impact healthcare and saw the opportunities behind policy and technology advancements. Soon he was tapped to join the Obama administration as CTO, a newly created role that President Obama formed on the first day of his presidency.

Cornerstone to his approach was the opening up of data to catalyze innovation. At the time, he saw an example in Brightscope, a company that accessed 401(k) corporate fee data from the government and used that to shed light on the variability of fee structures in the finance industry.

That could translate to healthcare. Chopra cited the example of iTriage, which created an app that harnessed government data to locate the cheapest federal qualified health centers in a user’s vicinity.

The government can make a difference by unlocking data. “The bottom line is that we have tools in the toolkit to allow civil servants to help and be supportive without having to wait five to 10 years to make a legislative difference,” Chopra said.

The government also is supporting innovation as it is embracing Sigma Lean methodology and working towards more efficient practices. He cited the development of an “innovation pathway” at the FDA for breakthrough devices, which was offered as a faster and cheaper approval process providing greater regulatory certainty.

The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation is another example signaling government’s push for innovative payment models. Through it, “the government can issue a payment trial for any model you want. If an actuary certifies that it saves money, anyone can use it." Calling this approach “innovation pipeline management,” he said it allows healthcare players to test new approaches, scale them and keep what works.

Many opportunities exist already to take advantage of government data to create compelling products and services. For instance, Medicare patients can freely give providers three years of their claims history, which is available on their Blue Button file. “These assets should be mined,” he said.

“If we had a three-year headstart on that data, how much of a starter would that be for population health?” he said. “There should be massive demand for that file… For three years these data have been open and you can hear the crickets.”