Aneesh Chopra Blazes Trails from Industry to Government and Back Again

Aneesh Chopra was Secretary of Technology for the state of Virginia when the Obama administration came knocking. The president wanted Chopra to tap the nation’s technical capabilities to meet challenges—like the deployment of electronic health records for veterans. Chopra was ready.

What did the president want him to do?

“The president wanted an advisor in the White House,” Chopra says. This advisor’s role would be to cut across business, cut across government, and leverage public-private relationships to maximize the value of technology.

So, Chopra became Chief Technology Officer—the nation’s first—and as Obama wrote in praise of Chopra’s book “Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government,” he helped bring our government into the 21^st century.

Chopra served as the president’s CTO from 2009–2012, and in 2011, near the end of his tenure, Modern Healthcare named Chopra to its list of 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare.

The final episode of our podcast for 2023 charts Chopra’s path from growing up as a child of immigrants in New Jersey to his role today as President of CareJourney, an analytics platform that aims to reduce costs and improve quality in healthcare.

And, of course, no episode is complete without some future-forward thinking:

“New technologies are going to usher in a completely better care experience—without new laws or actions or budgets,” Chopra says. “We can make the current systems work better.”