Todd Y. Park, co-founder of medical technology companies Athenahealth and Castlight Health, Among Team Assembled to Fix Obamacare

October 21, 2013 Leave a comment

Entrepreneur Park Among Team Assembled to Fix Obamacare

Todd Y. Park, the entrepreneur who became the U.S. chief technology officer last year, is among a team of the “best and brightest” now rushing to bring the hobbled Obamacare health insurance websites up to speed. Park, a co-founder of medical technology companies Athenahealth Inc. (ATHN) and Castlight Health Inc., is assisting in trying to fix healthcare.gov, Jason Young, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a phone interview today. The government last week also asked the site’s main contractor, a unit of Montreal-based CGI Group Inc. (GIB/A), to add staff and assign its “A-Team” to the efforts, Young said.Almost 500,000 people have applied for insurance through state and federal exchanges that opened Oct. 1, despite technical problems that have hamstrung the U.S. site, HHS said in a blog post today. The agency promised a “tech surge” to make improvements, in the administration’s first detailed comments on how it planned to correct flaws with the site.

“To ensure that we make swift progress, and that the consumer experience continues to improve, our team has called in additional help to solve some of the more complex technical issues,” the post said. The government is “bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve healthcare.gov.”

HHS also plans to employ members of a White House program called “innovation fellows” to help with the site, Young said. The innovation fellows are from the private sector, academic institutions and nonprofits who temporarily work on federal government projects with difficult histories, including computer and data systems and disaster response.

Young said he didn’t know which fellows would work on healthcare.gov and two White House spokeswomen didn’t immediately respond to e-mailed questions about the fellows.

To contact the reporters on this story: Alex Nussbaum in New York at anussbaum1@bloomberg.net; Alex Wayne in Washington at awayne3@bloomberg.net

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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