Q: You are embarking on a second round of HHSentrepreneurs. What’s on tap for round 2?
A: Instead of four projects, we have six. The gamut of different ideas has expanded. What I think is pretty cool is that it’s not just technology stuff. Some of them are technology related, but a lot of them are process and efficiency related so I’m excited about that because it brings different ways of thinking and different skill sets into the government. What we’re hoping to get is a really strong cohort of people to apply and hopefully be selected for each one of those projects, people who are willing to do new and interesting things. One of the aspects I find interesting about this program is that many of the solutions are going to be portable outside HHS, not just something we will keep on the inside. Many, many elements of the federal government can take advantage of this stuff.

Q: Vivek Kundra said when he was CTO of DC that he and his staff regularly used technology at home that was so much more sophisticated than what they were saddled with at work. Has that been your experience, and how has it shaped what you bring to the job?
A: In a certain sense it is what it is when these agencies have their very stratified policies about what they will and won’t support. So one of the things we’re tying to do is prove that there are different ways of still maintaining security while allowing people to work with technologies and devices they might be more comfortable with. In some ways we’re the perfect pilot for any kind of bring your own device scenario. We’re a very good pilot group for different types of technologies as well, so collaboration or issue tracking software, for examples, and different devices or pieces of equipment necessary to solve problems.

A great example is one of the projects in the first round with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness Response. Basically, the project is designed to help us locate people in disasters who have durable medical equipment, which are electrically-powered devices that typically have problems in emergencies as soon as your battery discharges. What happens today is that in emergencies these people tend to flock to emergency rooms because they’re the last places to have power but sometimes the emergency rooms are destroyed and, furthermore, the last thing you want in the ER is a whole bunch of people plugged into the wall just because they need electricity. Frank Sanborn is our entrepreneur for this project and he had a great idea, which was to take some potentially hackable commodity hardware using Raspberry Pi and essentially building a prototype device that can be plugged into durable medical equipment that will both read the current capacity and state of the battery and also transmit out in real-time the status of that device so you can locate people to triage the situation and bring help to those who need it first. We’re looking at holding hackathons on the hardware, we’re going to run pilot tests in various places. It’s really pretty cool.

Q: Your predecessor Todd Park had a famous line saying that he wanted to make HHS the NOAA of healthcare. Are you continuing that push and if so how?
A: Sure. I don’t know if I would really call it the NOAA of healthcare because what we do is a little bit different. But I will say that we are sitting on a vast treasure trove of data that can be used in any number of ways — things that we’ve seen and things we can’t even begin to imagine — and it has the power to fundamentally transform healthcare and the delivery of human services. So we’re continuing this effort in a real big way and we’re actually in the process right now of developing an execution plan for the next couple of years, which is going to have a few different elements to it, not just data liberation, which was the primary focus of the last few years, but also adding in components for better disseminations to get different groups of people involved from the outside world. And we want to start teaching people who might not know what the data means how to do interesting things with it. So stay tuned, we’re going to have some exciting developments coming up.

Q: What else should I be asking about HHSentrepreneurs? 
A: Just that I want to encourage people to apply. We have a bunch of applications in already for the next round but I’d love to see more people, maybe even from outside of the healthcare world. The best things happen when you get people with different sets of experiences, different backgrounds, mingling together in one place.