Former CMS data chief Niall Brennan rejoins government

Former chief data officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Niall Brennan, is taking on a new role as a senior advisor to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, the CDC confirmed to Nextgov/FCW.

Brennan, who announced his return to government on the social network formerly known as Twitter, said that he will be focusing on “ensuring the success of CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative,” something the agency says is a multi-billion-dollar push “to get better, faster, actionable insights for decision-making at all levels of public health.”

Brennan is leaving a role as chief analytics and privacy officer at Clarify Health Solutions to join the CDC. His last role in government was as CMS’ chief data officer. Brennan left that job in 2017, according to his Linkedin, to move to be President and CEO of the Health Care Cost Institute. 

He’s previously told Nextgov/FCW, that he’s “definitely a data geek” and described his work at CMS “as maximizing CMS data for internal and external users.” During his time at CMS, he led a push for data transparency, with CMS beginning to release data about how healthcare providers charge Medicare.

Now, Brennan will be advising CDC director Mandy Cohen and looking at the agency's multi-year, billion-plus effort “to modernize core public health data and surveillance infrastructure across the federal and state public health landscape” after the”volume and velocity of COVID-19 cases quickly [overwhelmed] public health data systems” during the pandemic.

Started in 2020, the CDC says the effort will take process and policy changes in addition to technology to create “connected, resilient, adaptable, and sustainable ‘response-ready’ systems” out of “siloed and brittle public health data.”

So far, the agency says that it’s rolled out a cloud-based platform to publish findings more quickly, stood up a Center for Epidemic Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, created an Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology with a strategy to go with it and more.