Nominee For Top Health Job Seen As I.T. Advocate

Some People who know Mike Leavitt well expect that the former Utah governor will be a strong new advocate of President Bush's goal to get America's health-care system wired.

Bush nominated Leavitt last week as the new secretary of health and human services to replace Tommy Thompson, who announced his plans to resign from the post a few weeks ago. For the last year, Leavitt has been head of the Environmental Protection Agency; before that, he had been elected governor of Utah three times, serving 11 years.

"No governor got technology more than Mike Leavitt," says Utah's CIO, W. Val Oveson, who worked with Leavitt for 12 years in a number of positions before Leavitt joined the EPA. "Mike is IT-savvy and will make an incredible secretary [in part] for that reason," Oveson says.

During Leavitt's tenure as governor of Utah, the state built a Web portal supporting more than 200 services, including driver's license renewals and other transactions for citizens. The state also began building the Utah Health Information Network, which started as a clearinghouse for electronic payments by insurers to health-care providers, Oveson says. That network will be expanded over the next several years to support transactions with pharmacies and possibly electronic health records, he says.

In addition to that, Utah launched an electronic system to support human-services programs, including case-management processes related to Utah's Medicaid operations. "Mike understands the power of these kinds of networks," Oveson says. "A whole new paradigm in the delivery of human services started under his watch" as governor.