Hey guys, today I'm very honored to interview Todd Park. And Todd Park, for you guys that don't know, he is an American entrepreneur and technology leader known for using data and innovation to improve healthcare and government services. He served as the chief technology officer of the United States under President Barack Obama from 2012 to 2014 where he helped drive efforts in open data and digital transformation. Before his time in government, he co-founded the healthcare technology company Athena Health and he later returned to the private sector to continue building companies focused on improving the healthcare system. Again, thank you so much for the time today, Todd. Um, and just to go straight into the first question, you know, you've had a very unique path from building companies to serving as the US CTO and how does your thinking about impact and scale really change through those experiences?
Uh, well, first of all, Daniel, it's great to be here with you. Thank you so much for doing this podcast series. Um, it's a great question. So my life's work has been innovating to advance the public interest across sectors, the private sector, public sector. And what I've learned over the years is that there's actually a core pattern of action, a very pattern of action that really works well in terms of generating impact. Whether it be basically building companies in the private sector or making something happen that is positive in the public sector. And you basically start with a mission that you believe in with all your heart that can impact the public in a deeply positive way. Um, you put together a small team that's incredibly capable, that is deeply diverse, and is mission-oriented to the core, right? Really motivated by the heart at the core. And you pursue a pattern of action that really focuses on rapid iteration and learning. The faster you can learn, the better. To basically continually update your assumptions about everything. And on the basis of updated assumptions and updated learnings, to build the thing from the ground up that is going to have the impact that you really really want. Um, and I found that that's a pattern that really works well really across sector on any mission that is fundamentally innovating to advance the public interest.
Really? Oh wow. And you know thank you for the answer. After public service, right? What made you, I guess, as I described about you earlier, what made you want to come back and really build Devoted Health?
Um it was really just a continuation of the work of my life, you know, and Devoted is actually a company that my brother Ed and I have been dreaming about, I think, for decades. Um, and in a very real sense, everything we've ever done, right, has been a lead-up to prepare us to build Devoted. And 2017, he and I co-founded together. Work on it until God takes us home, as they said. Um, and, it's also the case that, my brother and I built Athena Health together with our close friends. And I spent 11 years with him. Then I went to go serve in the American government for seven years and he stayed at Athena. And in 2017 we reunited and you know kind of long story short I on top of really wanting to build Devoted with him as a collective dream, I just missed him a ton. Yeah, I should see that. So we like to say that like you know half the reason we started Devoted is just so we could hang out all the time [laughter] work together again and that's truly a core reason [laughter] on top of all the other reasons that we together.
Yeah. Mhm. I mean, yeah, that's a great story and obviously what you're doing is so important and you know, these days, you know, American healthcare is still frustrating for many people, right? And so, what do you think right now is most broken and what do outsiders, you know, underestimate about fixing it?
Yeah. I mean, I think the most important thing to understand about the issues with American healthcare is that it's a multivariant problem, right? Um and you know there are problems with how it's paid for. There are problems with how the care delivery is structured. There are problems with underlying technology and data and the entire kind of mode of operation of the healthcare system. And that is not the fault of the doctors or the nurses. I mean my wife as you know is a doctor and she's better at everything right. American doctors are the best doctors in the history of humanity. Yeah, they're living in a system that for a bunch of historical reasons is deeply incentive misaligned, information poor, fragmented, uncoordinated, non-prevention-oriented, non-consumer-centric, non-whole-person, and as a result Americans just don't get the right whole-person-oriented, prevention-oriented care upfront and throughout and because that's true they experience way too many catastrophes that result in hospitalizations and surgeries and other events that should have been avoided. Right. And so what you want to do is you want to move the country's healthcare system toward a paradigm which is the opposite of all the brokenness. So one that's truly whole-person-oriented, prevention-oriented, highly coordinated, personalized, proactive and consistent. One that gets people care upfront throughout, right? That is the right care for them that keeps them as healthy as possible. Also has the property of then reducing cost a ton because you prevent the need for going to the hospital or surgery etc. So in other words the kind of care that you want for your own mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, and that's the kind of care that Devoted has been built to deliver and delivers to a growing number of folks across the country.
I see. And to talk about still talk about healthcare, right? You know, there's so much AI hype these days, right? And everyone's using AI and so into the healthcare, you know, where do you personally see this real near-term value and where do you think people, you know, need to be more careful?
Well, from just a hands-on perspective with respect to what we're doing at Devoted, um AI is incredibly powerful, right? Incredibly powerful. And we're seeing this in the unleashing of the power of AI in our work. It's impacting everything we do. We built a purpose-built for healthcare AI orchestration and execution core in the hardware software platform that runs. And so we're seeing it radically reduce administrative cost and hassle. Um dramatically boost the personalization excellence of service and huge increases in the efficacy and efficiency of clinical care and just really accelerating our ability to build and iterate in the interest of delivering ever better editions of care. Um and I think the thing that is important to keep in mind is that at the end of the day to actually do things like that in healthcare or really in any industry, it's incredibly important to have built the right governance, the right workflow, data infrastructure, the right guardrails, the right channels through which to actually leverage the power of AI. If you don't actually do all of that incredibly hard work in the trenches, right? Then AI is not going to be super duper helpful to you in ways that are practical, right? But if you do the hard work, you know, government's governance, workflow, data, infrastructure building, right? Then it's like, you know, going from a world that didn't have electricity to a world that does. It's that big of a deal. Yeah. It is game-changing, world-changing for the public interest in a way that's deeply profound.
