Mr. Panchadsaram Goes to Washington

The Presidential Innovation Fellows program just got a little San Francisco infusion.

The White House announced today that Rock Health alum Ryan Panchadsaram was selected as a Presidential Innovation Fellow from an applicant pool of over 700. The program pairs innovators across the private sector, non-profits and academia with government counterparts. The program goals? To save taxpayer money, create jobs and ultimately transform the lives of every American. Ryan will lend his design, user experience and entrepreneurial prowess to an impressive group of collaborators, including Dr. Henry Wei, Cornell professor and senior medical director of innovation at Aetna, and Matthew McCall, an engineer known for his work in the open source EHR community.

“Our mission is to help patients get better access to their personal health data,” Ryan explained. “We are going to work with innovators inside government and leaders in the community to advance Blue Button. There’s an opportunity here to delight patients and make this data more meaningful to them.”

For those who need an introduction to Blue Button, here’s a bit of history: The Department of Veteran services, in partnership with Health and Human Services and several other government agencies, began the initiative to grant veterans, service members and Medicare beneficiaries access to download their health information. This initiative is now growing to include all Americans, which is where the Innovation Fellows come in. They’ll look on the program and workflows with fresh eyes, in the end granting access to information including current medications, claims, treatment data and lab reports.

Learn more about the initiative here. And if you’d like to get involved, follow or tweet to @ProjectBlueBtn.