Obama Administration’s Message to Health Care Start-Ups

OBAMA FOR USA

Aneesh Chopra, the nation’s chief technology officer, has a message for technology entrepreneurs who have started health care companies. At the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, he said that the Obama administration’s goal is to change health care policies in a way that spurs innovation by start-up companies.

There is funding for health care I.T. in the stimulus package, but entrepreneurs should focus on broader policy changes than the stimulus, he said. “It is more important for us to create the market conditions that would inspire game-changing” innovations, he said.

For example, too many patients who show up at the emergency room with chest pains and get stents return to the hospital within a month. Part of the problem, he said, is that hospitals have an economic incentive to increase rather than reduce the number of patient visits.

The Obama administration is working on a new policy that would discourage these return visits. “By modifying the actual market conditions, we might unload a range of innovations,” Mr. Chopra said. “Hospitals would be hungry for entrepreneurial ventures like yours to tell them how you would keep track of the patient upon discharge,” he told the audience of health start-up founders.

Other changes in health care policy could include new policies on cyber-security and patient privacy and control that will “usher in a new wave of growth on the Internet” for health care start-ups, Mr. Chopra said. The government is also working on initiatives regarding care for veterans and mobile health care, and subsidizing medical students’ salaries if they work in private companies like a health care start-up.

Mr. Chopra also encouraged software developers to get in touch with him to tell him which federal data sets they want access to. For example, developers could use data from the Department of Agriculture to create a Web or mobile application with food nutrition information, or data from the Department of Health & Human Services to create an application about H1N1 flu prevention.

“Even in this time of economic difficulty, we are highly confident that the next round of Fortune 500 companies will be born in this era,” Mr. Chopra said. (NYTimes.com)

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