HHS picks Fox for CTO

Susannah Fox, who ran the health and technology surveys for the Pew Internet Project, and was most recently the entrepreneur-in-residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has been tapped to serve as CTO of the Department of Health and Human Services.

At Pew, Fox led efforts to understand how Americans use new technology to access health care and health information, as technology to monitor individual health was entering the everyday lives of health care consumers.

Fox wrote on an HHS blog post that she is looking forward to aiding administration efforts to open more health data, and to supporting the HHS Idea Lab, which gives government employees more freedom to experiment with new ideas and connects individual entrepreneurs with pressing health technology problems.

"Technology's true impact is only just now emerging in this area. The Internet gives us greater access to information, yes, but even more importantly, it gives us access to each other," Fox wrote.

Fox takes over for Bryan Sivak, who founded the Idea Lab. Sivak announced his departure in late March and stepped down at the end of April.