Aneesh Chopra is many things: President Barack Obama's go-to guy on high-tech, a one-time technology and innovation advisor to Virginia's former governor Tim Kaine, and a 1994 graduate of Johns Hopkins University. Just don't call him a "czar."
"I don't use that term," he says.

Chopra, like his colleagues in the president's inner circle, seems to spend a certain amount of his time assuring the public that the administration is not instigating a Communist-style takeover of, well, everything. When he's not managing the message, Chopra focuses his considerable brain power on issues of information technology, cyber security, partnerships between the government and private tech companies, and expanding the nation's broadband network. He does this work under the newly minted title (the one that tempts journalists to use the dreaded "C" word) of U.S. Chief Technology Officer. It is in this role that he meets each morning in the West Wing with two dozen other top presidential advisers—specialists on the environment, health care, the economy, and other knotty issues. "My job is to make sure that the president gets the best advice he can, to think through the issues and the options before him whenever any of those issues come to the table," Chopra says.

One of these advisors—former green jobs not-a-czar Van Jones—was ushered out of the White House when some insufficiently patriotic statements from a past life landed on conservative commentator Glenn Beck's desk. And technology seems to incite particularly acute paranoia. There is good reason, perhaps: Reports of cyber attacks and stolen government and personal secrets don't inspire feelings of warmth and security. But it is ironic that the very thing that keeps the U.S. at the pinnacle of world power seems terribly frightening to many Americans. Call it another sign that we're losing our edge on our competition overseas—a trend that Chopra and others are hoping to reverse.

Q Talk a bit about what this new chief technology officer position really means for the White House and for America
A What President Obama has done is acknowledge that you cannot have a conversation about the broader issues without understanding the role that technology and innovation might have within them. Whether it be changing our health care system, modernizing our education system, thinking about ways to improve our approach to energy independence—these issues all presume a certain amount of opportunity for technology innovation to deliver game-changing benefits. I'll be very specific. Health care [information technology] is one that we believe to be foundational to the overall discussion of health reform. The stimulus package called on [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] to make available some $20 billion in incentive payments to physicians who are willing to adopt certain technologies that are capable of delivering health care reform outcomes. The foundation of that investment is whether there are technology standards that would allow physicians to communicate with one another, with their patients, with hospitals, and with the broader health care system.


Q This talk about digitizing health records and putting them into a nationwide system has set off a lot of alarms about patient privacy.

A It starts with a very basic premise: We want physicians and patients to have access to the right information about the right interventions to the various conditions they have at the right time so that they can get high quality health care. If health information moves from paper to digital, it can be prone to a cyber attack. The good news is that there are existing technical standards for security and privacy that one can adopt without having to reinvent the wheel, to make sure that a patient's sensitive medical information can be protected as we progress from a paper environment to a digital environment. And as long as you do so in a thoughtful way, we're going to get the right mix of data liquidity, patient privacy, and achieving the health care goals we need.


Q You talk about developing a nationwide system that contains hundreds of millions of Americans' medical information within it. Who controls that?

A Let's be very clear. What you're describing is a noun—"There is a thing, and in that thing is all of my personal medical information." I disagree with the premise. There is no probability that a national single "noun" database will be created, funded by God knows who, that will store all of this. What we really focus on is the verb. That is, I have certain conditions, and I'd like to share those conditions with a doctor, with my insurance company, with whomever. So the premise behind the national health information network is that we already have, all across this country, thousands of hospitals, and hundreds of thousands of physicians, each of whom have authority over a database. And the question is, How do we set standards so that, when information moves from my physician's office to hospital A or to physician's office B, the act of moving that information is governed by a set of security- and privacy-protecting standards? The goal is just to focus on those narrow circumstances when information should move from point A to point B.


Q You really are keyed in on this conversation about technology and the debate between nouns and verbs. This is huge for you, isn't it?

A It is. So many of us get excited on a personal level because of the new cell phone or the new computer that's got a particular design. We're obsessed in the media around the cool nouns. And from a policy standpoint, a great deal of what we're trying to achieve is a set of verbs that can be better empowered through the use of technology. You want to educate a child? Well, we do so today with a classroom that looks the same as it might have looked a hundred years ago: a teacher in front of a group of students, going through materials. Well, in a modernized environment, what does a purely digital experience look like from a learning standpoint? We should have a discussion about that—the verb: How do I educate a child? And what are the capabilities that our technology sector can produce that can help? Could you imagine a [computer] platform that understands how a child learns and, as it understands the child's learning ability, actually changes the software and how it teaches a concept so it better matches the way a child learns? This kind of cognitive learning is not such a futuristic concept. There's actually capability today to help do some of this work. My job is to find a thoughtful way to introduce that into our policy framework.

In the near future, we'll be publishing the application guidelines for the i3 Fund—the Investing in Innovation Fund. This $65 million will be sort of seed capital [for] really creative ideas that don't often get the chance to see the light of day. For the first time, we're going to have this incredible asset, born out of the stimulus package, that will help us to change the way we think of education in the 21st century and to at least prototype and scale some of these early ideas. What's the measure of success? None could be more important than the president's goal that the United States return, by the year 2020, to being the nation with the highest proportion of college graduates of any country on earth. [The U.S. currently trails only Norway in having the largest percentage—30 percent—of residents age 25 to 64 with four-year college degrees. —ed.] What we have to do is find a way, using technology and innovation, to reduce the number of dropouts, to increase the number of those who pursue GEDs, and ultimately a community college and then four-year schooling.



Q We all know that we're sorely behind Europeans, Indians, and Chinese in the areas of math, technology, and science education. There are no other countries in the world that have the research institutions that the United States has, but there's no farm team from our schools, pushing its way up into our research institutions. That has to be turned around.

A What we need to do is improve the quality, the standards, the rigor of our nation's schools, and to do so through incentives. [Through the Department of Education's Race to the Top Program] we're going to put $4 billion into the states who agree to basically elevate their performance, their quality of education, so they can achieve the broad objectives the president calls for—namely the higher education [attainment] rate, but also paying some specific attention to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

I gotta tell you—every CEO I interface with, whether they be in the technology industry or outside of it, all point to this as the number one priority. Get the workforce in the 21st century right, and we will retain our leadership position in the world in terms
of innovation.