The 2 tech offices helping to change CMS’ approach to mission success – Federal News Network

CMS chief operating officer Kim Brandt and CIO Patrick Newbold say a new culture of delivering IT capabilities and scaling them quickly is taking hold.
When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services created its new Office of Health Technology and Products in June, it wasn’t about reducing or undercutting its chief information officer.
Rather, the office is a stronger recognition of the new way CMS is trying to using technology to drive service improvements to citizens.
Kim Brandt, the deputy administrator and chief operating officer of CMS, said the Office of Health Technology and Products (OHTP) and the CIO’s office are complimentary and partners in delivering the technology and infrastructure to the mission.
“Patrick is still very much leading our enterprisewide IT and technology and all the things that he’s always been doing. The way I like to think about it is the new OHTP, as we call it, is supposed to help us be able to modernize a lot of our technology in terms of existing things that we have in place in terms of existing business products, and then help us build new digital products across all three of our lines of business: Medicare, Medicaid and the marketplace,” Brandt said on Ask the CIO. “The whole goal here is that Patrick’s shop is still the ones that are doing all the cybersecurity and the enterprisewide IT, the cloud, the migrations and all the platform stuff. But then the new office, which is led by Amy Gleason, is really supposed to help us design, develop and help bring up digital products and platforms, particularly ones that would be used by beneficiaries, providers and states. It’s sort of more of the external-facing types of products that they’re helping CMS build.”
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OHTP is led by Amy Gleason, who also is CMS’s chief product officer, deputy administration and also leading the U.S. DOGE Service at the Office of Management and Budget, and is charged with managing everything from open source to standards and interoperability to product development.
Brandt said OHTP will work more like private sector technology companies, hiring software engineers and developers to drive digital transformation initiatives.
“The goal here is that Amy’s team builds products that primarily touch beneficiaries or help states or external partners, whereas Patrick and his team are still the ones making sure that once those products get up and launch, that they are helping integrate them into our CMS system, maintaining them, operationalizing them and implementing them,” she said. “They work very closely together. Patrick’s team still designs and builds a lot of stuff too. It’s just the things that Amy and her team are doing are a little more of the beneficiary facing.”
Patrick Newbold, the CIO of CMS, said he sees OHTP as a force multiplier in how the agency can deliver technology services better and faster based on mission needs.
“This new office, OHTP, works in close coordination with the CIO, and just as our other program offices that deliver IT, we all are governed by the cybersecurity architecture, capital planning, investment oversight by the CIO, and that’s by law. These roles are very much not competing. We are teammates. We are one CMS, and we have one objective, and we’re doing it together,” Newbold said. “I would give my version of a simple way to think of this, I would say that OHTP helps CMS shape and deliver strong health products, and my office makes sure those products can connect and scale and stay secure and operate as part of one enterprise.”
The collaboration between the CIO and OHTP offices is more about turning policies into tools into mission services than competing over who does what and how. Newbold said delivering capabilities and scaling them quickly while reducing the time to achieve outcomes is driving so much of CMS’s efforts.
With that goal in mind, CMS is pushing the development of mission-focused technology to the right. Newbold said the best technology starts before anyone writes any code.
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“What I mean is that starts with the business owner, and Kim is always asking, ‘What problems are we trying to solve? Who fills that problem, and what results would matter?’ So, the business owner owns a mission result, and our offices bring the engineering, the security, the data architecture and the delivery discipline to achieve that. Together we build a roadmap that’s going to show us that we are doing what we need to do in the progress as one team,” Newbold said. “So, to me, that changes the conversation. Instead of asking, did we launch a tool? The real question is, did we reduce wait times? Did we reduce burden? Did we make a payment more accurate? Did we help a worker or employee make a better decision? That is when I think a great partnership works, and we’re on the same page. And when there is tension between speed and risk, my role as a CIO and the CISO, who works with me, is not to say ‘no.’ It is to make the risk clear to Kim Brandt as the COO, find a safer path or a more secure path, and then decide at the right level.”
Brandt added that CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz made it clear that modernizing the agency’s technology infrastructure and systems was a top priority.
She said one of the biggest challenges was getting employees out of “their bureaucratic institutional ways of looking at IT because we’re creatures of the bureaucracy.”
“I think what has been a great example of this is the push towards interoperability and how we’ve really been looking at that through the health tech ecosystem and trying to get it so that we’re building application programming interfaces (APIs) and that we’re doing things to make it easier to share data to make it so that we have more products that are API compliant, so that we can move those around,” she said. “Patrick and his team have been instrumental in supporting that. To me, that’s really where it comes down to. It’s like all of a sudden we aren’t afraid of the new technologies; we’re embracing them, and we’re figuring out how we can deploy them in ways that will actually help the beneficiaries.”
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Jason Miller is executive editor of Federal News Network and directs news coverage on the people, policy and programs of the federal government. 
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