Todd Park (@todd_park), newly appointed Chief Technology Officer of the Federal government, gave an inspiring keynote address at Healthbox investor day in Chicago this week.

Park, co-founder of athenahealth in 1997, is clearly very passionate about entrepreneurs and a big believer in the entrepreneur’s ability to effect tremendous disruption through invention.

There has never been a better time than right now to be an entrepreneur in American health care due to big shifts in the marketplace, specifically incentive change, and date liberation.

Fee for service has failed to lead to continuing improvements in quality, efficiency and outcomes. It was clear that Park believes the new reimbursement model based on patient outcomes is a huge game changer, a point which is very difficult to dispute. Below are some tweets about Todd Park.

Park clearly believes there is a tremendous opportunity to both improve the quality of care AND coordination of providing care AND cost of that care. “We need to move from healthcare by volume to healthcare maximization, but this is impossible without data liberation.”

According to Park, true data liquidity is the first step to achieving data liberation and making significant progress toward utilizing technology to improve the quality and lower the costs of care. Half the care that veterans get is outside the VA system, so it’s essential to give them true data liquidity.

Park had served as the CTO of the Department of Health and Human Services prior to becoming CTO for the entire Federal government, where he was instrumental in guiding the agency through its implementation of Meaningful Use and the government incentives for physicians who adopt electronic medical records in their practice. According to Park, 211,000 physicians have applied for Meaningful Use incentives, and 42,000 have been approved.

Park highlighted the activities of the Direct Project, which is aiming to make the exchange of personal health data secure and based off of one universal protocol uniting all vendors and providers. Another federal program singled out by Park was Blue Button, launched by the VA to allow patients to go to the VA website and download their own health care record. 750,000 veterans have chosen to download their data multiple times each, and interestingly physicians came to HHS and said “was that legal under HIPAA to allow patients to download their own records?”

“I have never been more optimistic than I am right now about the future of healthcare. The future is already here, its just not evenly distributed yet.” A great quote to sum up the digital health movement and the inspiring talk given by Todd Park on how entrepreneurs can and will be the answer to the challenges facing our health care system. “If you get the best people, you win.”

Here are some more of the best tweets about Todd Park’s keynote from me and my fellow attendees.