Chopra resigning as nation's CTO

Aneesh Chopra, the federal government’s first chief technology officer and assistant to the president, has resigned, the White House announced Jan. 27. He is expected to leave in early February.

Chopra, who is known for his high-octane enthusiasm at healthcare and technology industry conferences, was instrumental in making developer challenges and contests a tool for government to use to promote innovative applications quickly and to complement traditional procurement methods and grants. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT was the first federal office to adopt the technology competitions.

Reports suggested he may enter politics in Virginia, where he was the state’s former secretary of technology under then-Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat who is now running for a Senate berth from the Virginia. Chopra joined the administration of President Barack Obama in 2009.

According to the Washington Post, Chopra may consider throwing his hat into the race for lieutenant governor of Virginia.

In announcing the resignation, Obama said that Chopra did “groundbreaking work to bring our government into the 21st century.”

“Aneesh found countless ways to engage the American people using technology, from electronic health records for veterans, to expanding access to broadband for rural communities, to modernizing government records,” the president said in a statement.

Chopra has been an advocate for transparency and the administration’s Open Government efforts to enable Americans to better view the operations of their government and to use some of the volumes of data that it holds.

At the Jan. 27 Care Innovations Summit, Chopra announced a group of applications development contests and talked about the power of collaboration and expertise of those “who are largely outside of the four walls of any particular government building in Washington or the surrounding ecosystem of folks who dominate the discourse of the Nation’s Capital” to solve the nation’s problems, such as students, entrepreneurs, faculty members, large and small corporations.

Chopra also has worked with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and has taken active roles on its advisory Health IT Standards Committee. For example, he led a small team to identify standards and federal data services, which could be used to streamline eligibility and enrollment in Medicaid and other health and human services programs.

Chopra also held the title of associate director for technology within the Office of Science & Technology Policy to advance the administration’s technology agenda by fostering new ideas and encouraging government-wide coordination.

Before entering public service, Chopra was managing director with the Advisory Board Company, a publicly-traded healthcare think tank.