The Health and Human Services Department named Joy Pritts, an assistant research professor at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute, as chief privacy officer in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.
The chief privacy officer is a new role at ONC, part of a re-organization now underway to help the office meet its responsibilities under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
As chief privacy officer, Pritts will advise Dr. David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health IT, on forming policies on privacy, security and data stewardship of electronic health information, ONC said in an announcement Feb. 17.
She will also coordinate similar efforts with other federal, state and regional agencies and also with foreign countries.
Blumenthal said Pritts, who started her job Feb. 16, has extensive experience on all the issues that ONC grapples with. For instance, she was heavily consulted by members of Congress in legislating the HITECH health IT incentive law.
"So she has an understanding of the legislative process and a policy understanding, in addition to having worked for the government previously," Blumenthal said in answer to a reporter's question after a meeting of HHS's Health IT Policy Committee.
"She has a combination of an understanding of government, understanding of the issues, and her legal background is very important " her research and policy qualifications," he added.
Pritts has participated in a number of federal health IT initiatives, including serving on the Technical Advisory Panel for the multi-state Health Information Security and Privacy Collaborative (HISPC).
She is also a member of the board of the National Governors Association's State Alliance for e-Health, HHS said.
Both groups tackled questions related to the privacy and security of health information, particularly the impact of interstate health information exchange on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rule.
At Georgetown, Pritts has been a senior scholar with the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Her work has focused on the privacy of health information and patient access to medical records at both the federal and state levels, HHS said.
Among her publications, Pritts was the primary author of The State of Health Privacy: An Uneven Terrain, a survey of state health privacy statutes, written while she was senior counsel at the Health Privacy Project, part of the Center for Democracy and Technology.
She has testified before Congress on issues related to privacy and the commercial use of medical information and holds a law degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
