Federal 100: Henry Chao

Henry Chao
Deputy CIO
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Health and Human Services Department

The work: Creating a cloud-based system to support the Health Insurance Exchange program, a marketplace that offers affordable insurance options for families and small businesses.

The impact: Chao helped create a new pricing and licensing model that will save the government millions of dollars.

The nuts and bolts: The cloud architecture made it possible to build a virtual environment in which federal, state and commercial organizations could collaborate on the exchanges, a component of the health care reform law. Besides being eminently scalable, Chao’s approach has reduced operational costs by enabling shared services and is now being used as a model for improving the efficiency of Medicare programs.

Read more about the 2012 Federal 100 award winners.