Todd Park is stepping down from his position as U.S. Chief Technology Officer (CTO), multiple media outlets are reporting.
Park was the U.S. CTO since March of 2012 and the second ever in the history of the country. Before that, Park was the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) CTO for three years, since 2009. He has been a longtime advocate of health IT initiatives and spearheaded several that are still in existence today.
The White House has yet to confirm Park’s depature.
As the head of the “Information Liberacion” initiative at HHS, Park worked to free up countless amounts of health information data for innovation in healthcare. The free data initiative led to many developer contests, which challenged developers and entrepreneurs to use the health data to better deliver healthcare digitally. After he left HHS, he continued to advocate for open data in healthcare. Most recently, Park launched an initiative that invites developers to use an open data portal for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) at Health Datapalooza in June.
At both HHS and in the White House, Park helped with the development of the Healthcare.gov website. He was part of the team that aimed to fix the website after its troubled start.
According to Fortune, Park is not leaving the White House completely. He will be moving to Silicon Valley, where he will recruit tech innovators to work for the federal government. Before he got involved with the government, Park co-founded athenahealth and Castlight Health, two notable, public health IT companies.
