Presidential Innovation Fellows — CT Numbers

A Connecticut resident is one of 43 “incredible Americans” selected as new Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIFs), to serve 6- to 12-month intensive “tours of duty” in the US Government, where they will work hand-in-hand with top government innovators to develop solutions that can save lives, save taxpayer money, and help fuel private-sector job creation.

Nayan Jain is a Presidential Innovation Fellow working on the MyData Initiatives (Blue Button) at the Department of Health and Human Services. Jain is an engineer and healthcare hacker with a passion for developing software that is able to simplify complexities by reducing noise and finding patterns in data. His career in health IT began as an undergraduate with a design for an administrative database for the Department of Neurosurgery at Emory Hospital.

The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program was created in 2012 to tackle five inaugural projects—each focused on making a part of the Federal Government work better for the American people. Each team of innovators is supported by a broader community of interested citizens throughout the country. Presidential Innovation Fellows put aside their jobs and day-to-day home lives to offer their skills and expertise in collaboration with Federal agency teammates to create huge value for the American public.

The 1st round of five projects was launched in August 2012 with 18 inaugural Fellows. The first round selections included Nick Bramble, Director of the Law & Media Program, Information Society Project at Yale Law School in New Haven. Bramble is a lawyer with a strong interest in improving how governments release data and promote engagement by citizens and startups.

The 2nd round of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program will include ten projects,– four that are the second phases of Round 1 projects and six new projects. Presidential Innovation Fellows have a unique opportunity to serve our Nation and make an impact on a truly massive scale. The MyData Initiatives seek to spread the ability for people to securely access to their own data while spurring the growth of private-sector applications and services that a person can use to crunch his or her own data for a growing array of useful purposes.

After graduating and a stint writing applications for back-office propane systems, Nayan Jain joined the DC-based startup, Audax Health. While serving as Director of Mobile Technology at Audax, he helped build the core Zensey mobile and web platforms that aim to drive behavior change through consumer engagement and social game mechanics. He collaborated to build MedTuner, an artificial intelligence that alerts its followers of important health events using techniques in machine learning and natural language processing, which was awarded first place at the 2012 Health 2.0 Developers’ World Cup in San Francisco, CA.

Most recently, he selected by Google to be a Glass Explorer and is looking forward to building wearable experiences that will help improve lives and patient outcomes. He graduated with a BS in Computational Media, primarily focused on Human Computer Interaction and Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He currently lives in Connecticut, but spends his spare time in New York, according to the PIF announcement.

Jennifer Pahlka, Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation reports that some of the tech innovators and change-agents who comprise the new class of Fellows will work on second phases of Round 1 PIF projects such as Blue Button (which is helping veterans and others across the country gain secure electronic access to their own personal health records); Open Data (which is making more and more government information like car safety ratings and hospital pricing available for use by the American people, including entrepreneurs and software developers who are turning those data into useful products and services); MyUSA (which is greatly simplifying the Web interface that citizens can use to find what they need from the Federal Government); and RFP-EZ.

For Round 2 of the PIF program, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have partnered with the US General Services Administration (GSA). Through this new partnership with GSA, which already works with every agency in the Federal Government, the prototype solutions that PIFs build will spread more efficiently throughout Government, enabling the program’s positive outcomes to reach more people more quickly.

For example, through Blue Button – a growing initiative across the public and private sectors – patients can download their own health information from a growing array of organizations (the Department of Veterans Affairs’ health system, private-sector health care providers, etc.) and securely share their medical histories with caregivers, import their prescription histories into mobile reminder apps, and more.

Others will work on new projects, such as developing tech tools to support disaster relief and recovery efforts; working with private-sector innovators to create consensus tech standards for the “Internet of Things,” which will connect a wide range of devices with embedded sensors and control systems, with big potential efficiencies and cost-savings; and helping Federal agencies save money through better, more cost-effective financial accounting systems.

Details on the entire class of Presidential Innovation Fellows is available on the web, and details about current and future rounds of the PIF program is at whitehouse.gov/innovation fellows,