The Department of Health and Human Services has three new officials to lead its work on artificial intelligence, technology and data.
According to biographies published on the ministry’s website on Monday, Alicia Rouault is the Department’s new Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and Chief Technology Officer, Kristen Honey is the department’s chief data officer, and Meghan Dierks is the leader of artificial intelligence.
The three new civil servants join the ministry after the announcement of a reorganization of its health, data, AI and cyber portfolios in July.
As part of these changes, key technology, data and AI roles have shifted from the department’s Assistant Secretary for Administration, where the office of the Chief Information Officer is located, to the office of the National Coordinator health information technology. Micky Tripathi, the current national coordinator for health information technology, was also named assistant secretary for technology policy, and what was once ONC became ONC/ASTP.
In a interview After the reorganization, Tripathi told FedScoop that finding officials to fill those three vacancies was “job one.” On Monday, this first task was completed. Dierks started Dec. 30 and Rouault and Honey started Monday, an agency spokesperson said in an email.
Rouault joins HHS from the White House Digital Service, where she most recently led a program to improve outcomes for Americans facing financial hardship and provide rapid response to state governments during the COVID pandemic -19, according to his biography.
Prior to working at USDS, she also held leadership positions in the General Services Administration’s 18F, which focuses on improving the user experience of government services. Earlier in her career, she worked as a senior advisor to Jennifer Pahlka at Code for America and was CEO and founder of LocalData, a technology startup, the bio says.
As CTO, Rouault leads the new Office of the Chief Technology Officer, which also houses the heads of data and AI. She will be the first person to hold this role since Ed Simcox left the post in 2020. The reorganization was intended in part to institutionalize that role, Tripathi told FedScoop this summer.
Honey, meanwhile, takes on the role of CDO after helping to initially establish the Office of the Chief Data Officer in 2020 as part of the pandemic response and serving as interim director at that time, according to her biography.
Prior to her selection as CDO, Honey was chief data scientist and executive director of HHS InnovationX, a collaborative data-driven problem-solving program within the agency, and previously led COVID-19 diagnostic informatics. 19. Before joining HHS, where she has worked for six and a half years, Honey worked on policy in the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Finally, Dierks joins HHS through industry and academia. Before being selected for the CAIO role, she was chief data officer at San Francisco-based healthcare software company Komodo Health. In this role, she “led the development and evaluation of AI-based healthcare analytics tools for life sciences companies, healthcare professionals, and patient advocacy groups ”, according to his HHS biography.
Since 2001, Dierks has been a professor at Harvard Medical School. While much of Dierks’ career has been in industry as an executive at companies such as GE Healthcare, Magellan Health and Lumeris Health Outcomes, she also has some agency experience health. Dierks worked in the Office of the Center Director at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health from 2006 to 2009.
Dierks took over the role after Tripathi served as interim CAIO. Greg Singleton, the former permanent CAIO, left the role after the Biden administration required top AI leaders within agencies to be appointed at the executive level. Although the requirement for CAIOs in federal agencies is relatively new, HHS has had such an official for years.