VA CTO Levin to step down

Department of Veterans Affairs Chief Technology Officer Peter Levin will resign effective March 1, he told FedScoop in an exclusive interview. Levin, recognized as one of the federal government’s most innovative and brilliant minds, has been the leading catalyst behind a number of ground-breaking initiatives to come out of the department, including the Fast Track electronic claims processing system, the Veterans Jobs Bank, and the open source custodial agent for health record modernization.

Levin is perhaps best known for leading the Blue Button initiative, where a patient is provided a convenient, clickable “radio button” to download his or her medical records in digital form from a secure website offered by their doctors, insurers, pharmacies or other health-related service. VA recently announced that it had made the complete medical record – everything except diagnostic images – available via Blue Button.

Since its creation almost three years ago, Blue Button has expanded beyond the department and has been adopted by hundreds of healthcare organizations in the private-sector, including United Healthcare, Microsoft, Aetna, RelayHealth and Humetrix...Levin has also been one of the leading proponents of the department’s innovation initiative, known as VAi2 and recently rebranded as VACI. In that program, the department funded more than 100 innovation projects, many of which are now being used across the department.  Levin led several of their special projects, including the Blue Button for America contest and the early prototypes of Blue Button Imaging...