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U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra spoke yesterday evening at an event in Burlington sponsored by the entrepreneurial networking organization TiE Boston. Chopra went to Harvard, and later worked in Massachusetts on healthcare IT issues for The Conference Board, a New York-based business think tank. Since then, he has been active with TiE chapters in Virginia, where he formerly served as the state’s secretary of technology. He seemed to know many of the people in the room, and said he had set up meetings with about five Boston-area entrepreneurs around the event.
He spoke before the meeting with Mass High Tech reporter Galen Moore about the government’s plan to issue new data standards for electronic health records, later this month, which Chopra said he hopes will spur the growth of startups developing new ways to traffick in that data. “If our standards work is effective, we should see an uptick in economic activity around Health 2.0,” he said. “We’ve done the heavy lifting of providing incentive payments. We’ll have to produce data standards capable of spurring product innovation.”
In Chopra’s remarks at the event, he invited entrepreneurs to work with government via new portals, such as a request form for government data sets that could be useful to infotech startups, or an idea proposal page operated by the Department of Defense. The following are excerpts from his remarks:
On access to government data:
The degree that we provide access to government information in new and creative ways we believe can be the foundation of a new round of job creation and firm growth. So we are pushing a very aggressive timeline to push the president’s open government agenda, which not only means we’re going to have a government that works, but it means we’re going to focus on finding those datasets that if we released, could unlock economic value.
I’m a little addicted to this Starbuck’s vanilla latté. My wife reminds me that it’s not very good for my health and I appreciate that input. It wasn’t until I downloaded this app called Lose It! (developed by Boston-area entrepreneurs J J Allaire and Charles Teague), where I key in my intake and it says, ‘You fool! Sugar intake is going through the roof! Beep Beep!’ I have slowed down my intake dramatically.
The underlying database that powers this particular application? The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s database for nutrition. This is a story that you’ll see in many areas. I call this open for business. You tell me what data you want and my job is to bird dog that data down so you can get it, and do it not in years, but in weeks.
On broadband:
We are also focused on infrastructure. We have to talk about broadband in this context. It is a national priority. For the first time ever this country will have a national broadband plan. It will be issued by the Federal Communications Commission in February and it will be a key part of my responsibility to assist in the implementation of that national broadband plan. My primary focus is to ensure that we address concerns with respect to cybersecurity as we roll out that next-generation infrastructure, so that we can unlock the next round of economic growth. We believe there’s a story yet to be told — whether it be in cloud computing or in other components we’ve yet to determine — born out of this next wave of broadband infrastructure capability.
On higher education:
I have yet to meet a CEO...who hasn’t said to me that their number one issue is quality workforce. Even in today’s environment where application volumes are up 75 percent, I’m told quality remains flat. It’s still a problem. The U.S. is no longer number one. In the decade 1999 to 2009, we’ve grown a whopping 3 percent in the share of our adult population with college degrees, ranking 15th on the (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation) list. The president has said we must return to number-one position by 2020. We’ve made significant investments in our community college ecosystem as a way to help advance the ball.
On research and development:
We’ve committed to doubling our funding for basic research and development within our key agencies — the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Office of Basic (Energy) Science in the Department of Energy – by 2016. We are on path to achieving that objective because so much of our stimulus investments were focused on innovation and R&D. The president has also challenged the private sector to invest in research and development and has called for our nation as a whole to exceed a 3-percent-of-GDP investment in R&D.
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