Aneesh Chopra, the nation's chief technology officer, appealed to the Health 2.0 community this week to help bring "game-changing innovation" to healthcare.

"I am deeply committed to the role that entrepreneurs play," Chopra, the U.S. government's CTO, told attendees at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. In government, he promised that great ideas would always find a way to get nurtured.

Innovation happens when you have the right leadership, he said.

Chopra joined President Obama at a community college in Troy, N.Y., last month where he announced his Innovation Strategy and its three pillars.

The first pillar - a modern and secure infrastructure - will enable the country's success, he said. By introducing stronger capabilities for cyber security and patient privacy, outlined in Obama's Cyber Security Strategic Plan, the government will help "usher a new wave of growth" on the Internet infrastructure.

The government is spending approximately $150 billion in basic R&D. Chopra's responsibility is to ensure that those investments "deliver the right value across all disciplines" for the taxpayers," he said.

The infrastructure will require training programs to grow the skilled workforce and enable the country to compete globally, he said.
The second pillar focuses on how to catalyze innovation for the country's top priorities, mainly healthcare, education and energy, he said. Chopra advised the audience to pay attention to the policy framework that sits outside of healthcare information technology. "It is more important for us to create the market conditions that will inspire game-changing innovation than any particular aspect of a subsidy," he said.

Obama's proposal to bundle payments for hospitals to lower readmission rates is a "modest example" of the Administration's use of incentives and modification of market conditions to unleash a range of innovation. If bundled payments are enacted, hospitals would need IT solutions.

"If we can create the market incentives to support wellness and prevention we might see a wide-ranging improvement in terms of the opportunities for entrepreneurial products and services to take hold," he said.

The third pillar revolves around innovation. "Our laser focuses on what we can do to improve the policy environment to encourage innovation," he said.

Chopra asked the Health 2.0 community to be actively involved as technical standards are being developed and to let him know what meaningful data sets are needed.

It takes small initiatives to get a modest track record going, he said, and with a healthy and productive dialogue and an execution plan focused on rigor and speed, innovation will help transform the healthcare industry.