White House Names New Federal CTO

Todd Park, CTO of Health and Human Services Department, gets the nod as the new federal chief technology officer. Park is known for his open government work.

...Park has been one of the foremost advocates of open government within the Obama administration. He has called for the creation of a healthcare data clearinghouse and speaks regularly on open government-related issues. Park has said that he sees open government as a way to make government work better. "The ultimate measure of success should be improvement in the fundamental efficiency and effectiveness of government," he said in a 2010 interview with InformationWeek.

From his role in HHS, Park helped out not only with electronic health records and HealthCare.gov, but also with the development of the Department of Veterans Affairs' Blue Button initiative for downloading veteran healthcare records, an online community for healthcare data at Data.gov, a new data council at HHS, and the release of APIs by the agency for application developer use. InformationWeek named Park one of the government's top 50 IT leaders in 2011...