09:37 AM As the United States got a new president on Wednesday afternoon, it also got a new National Coordinator for Health IT. Longtime industry veteran and interoperability pioneer Micky Tripathi was named to the role January 20 as part of a slate of new HHS appointments. Tripathi has long been a familiar face as a proponent of standards-based interoperability – and an expert with deep knowledge of the nuts and bolts behind it. He was the longtime CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, a pioneering group that launched way back in the pre-HITECH Act days of 2005 and became a national exemplar as the healthcare industry moved from manila folders to electronic health records.