Park: Government relies on private sector to innovate

In case anyone was still thinking the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act  was an insidious plot for government to take over healthcare, here’s HHS CTO Todd Park—you know, the co-founder of athenahealth—talking at this week’s South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. In this video, Park echoes the sentiments of his former business partner Jonathan Bush from an interview Bush gave me at HIMSS last month in saying that the government’s job isn’t to innovate but rather to lay the foundation for the private sector to innovate.

This is particularly important in the wake of my strong defense of Dr. Donald Berwick and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.