Staffing, AI policy top of mind for HHS’s new technology-focused assistant secretary

Staffing up and establishing policies to support departmentwide use of artificial intelligence are among the first steps for the Department of Health and Human Services’ new assistant secretary for technology policy following a reshuffle that put Micky Tripathi at the helm,  overseeing the agency’s technology, data and AI portfolios. 

The department announced the reorganization last week, primarily moving responsibilities from the Assistant Secretary of Administration to other components of the department. Among those changes, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, which Tripathi already led, is getting a new Office of the Chief Technology Officer that will house the department’s chief technology, data and artificial intelligence officers. The HHS is currently looking for officials for all three roles.

In an interview with FedScoop, Tripathi said “job one” is getting those positions filled and an organizational structure in place. After that, AI compliance — particularly with the Office of Management and Budget’s memo on AI — and policy-setting are top of mind. 

Tripathi, who is currently acting CAIO, said the department wants to have policies in place so employees embrace AI technologies and don’t “shy away from them” for fear of being out of compliance. Setting up those guardrails soon, so that “everyone in the department feels the comfort with being able to use these tools appropriately, is going to be an important thing,” he said.

The new organization for HHS comes as the department has “started to observe and embrace the importance of information technology,” Tripathi said. While working on various projects over the past couple of years, Tripathi said, the department began to see a greater need for “dedicated resources.” Those projects included HHS’s data strategy and its efforts on AI. 

HHS found itself “in an ad hoc manner, putting together teams to address these kinds of issues,” he said, underscoring the department’s need to have a “more dedicated” approach. That’s when the department started to think about consolidating some of those functions. 

Before the reorganization, the responsibilities now under ASTP/ONC (its new acronym) were nested under the Office of the Chief Information Officer. At a large organization like HHS, however, the internally focused compliance work that the CIO does is a “huge job in itself,” Tripathi said.

“As you start to think about AI and data strategy, for example, there’s a whole other dimension to it,” he said, adding that side is “really more externally focused.”

That’s where ONC comes in. ONC manages the health IT portfolio for HHS, overseeing standards for the exchange of health data, and already had a foundation of policy and strategy expertise to build upon, Tripathi said, calling it a “natural evolution of things” the office was doing. 

The new office, which expands on ONC’s existing technology unit, is envisioned as a place that will chart a path for the department’s strategy, while piloting and experimenting with new technology approaches. Once that office determines there is a set of technologies it wants to roll out, he said, there will be a “handoff” to the CIO for the enterprise side.

“Then we’ll work with the CIO’s office to say, ‘Alright, you know, the decision has been made that these are going to be rolled out across the enterprise. It’s now the CIO’s responsibility to make that available on every person’s laptop, for example,’” Tripathi said.

The technology office will also include a new Office of Digital Services that is similarly an expansion of ONC’s existing technical assistance work. Those efforts focus on helping agencies within HHS understand health IT standards for things like regulations and contracts. 

Under the new structure, that digital services team will also help organizations with things like innovative AI uses or data strategy, Tripathi said, providing a “central resource” that can ensure “more consistency across the agencies.”

Leading the new technology office, of course, will be the chief technology officer, which is a position HHS hasn’t had in recent years. The CTO role has been unfilled since Ed Simcox departed in 2020, and in its announcement, HHS said the restructure would “reinstitute” the position.

Tripathi said that role has been somewhat “personality-driven” in the past and varied in importance depending on the administration. But the reorganization stands to institutionalize that position more fully by having “an established mission that is independent of” leadership, which will make the department better in the long run, he said.

“We think that this is just so fundamentally important at this point,” Tripathi said of the CTO role.