Privacy Officer Named for Office of National Coordinator for Health IT:
Joy L Pritts, JD, of Georgetown University
Joseph Conn reported Feb 17, 2010 on ModernHealthcare.com that “Joy Pritts, a lawyer, privacy researcher and Georgetown University faculty member, has been named the first chief privacy officer for HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.”
Prior to her new appointment Joy L. Pritts, JD, was Senior Scholar of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and Research Associate Professor of the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University. Pritts is also listed as the “founding director of the Center of the Center of Medical Record Rights and Privacy at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute.”
http://hpi.georgetown.edu/privacy/index.html
As Mary Mosquera reported on Feb 17, 2010 in Government HealthIT, “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.”
Pritts Bio
Pritts provided this bio in a October 20, 2009 statement (pdf) to the HIT Policy Committee Information Exchange Workgroup about electronic exchange of laboratory Information: “I am a lawyer and a Research Associate Professor at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. In my position at Georgetown, I conduct research and analysis on a range of issues related to the exchange of health information. Much of my work has focused on the Privacy Rule issued under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), its scope and its interaction with state health law.
“I have written extensively on this topic including: The State of Health Privacy (2002); Implementing the Federal Health Privacy Rule in California (2002); “Altered States: State Health Privacy Laws and the Impact of the Federal Health Privacy Rule,” Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics (Spring 2002); and “Preemption Analysis Under HIPAA—Proceed with Caution,” In Confidence (April 2003); and state-specific consumer guides on how to obtain and amend medical records under a combination of the HIPAA Privacy Rule and state law (2007), available at http://hpi.georgetown.edu/privacy/records.html
“Most recently, I have worked with the Office of National Coordinator (ONC), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and RTI International on a series of legal surveys of state laws addressing the following topics:
–“Consent” requirements for disclosing health information for treatment;
–Permitted means and requirements for transmitting prescriptions;
–Individuals’ rights to access health information; and
–Clinical laboratory licensing laws restricting the disclosure of test results.”
Source: October 20, 2009 Statement by Joy L. Pritts, JD (pdf)
According to Howard Anderson’s story on Feb 17, 2010 on GovInfoSecurity.com, Pritts “served on the technical advisory panel for the multi-state Health Information Security and Privacy Collaborative (HISPC) and as a board member of the National Governors Association’s State Alliance for e-Health.”
