Lucia Savage Named ONC Chief Privacy Officer

Good morning ONC Team,

I am thrilled to announce that Lucia Savage, Esq. will join HHS and ONC as the Chief Privacy Officer. She brings to our team a set of rich experiences at the intersection of health information, privacy, and modernizing the health care delivery system. She has stellar qualifications and a passion for health IT in this nation and our work. I am confident that she will bring her wealth of experience to advance critical privacy and security policies in health IT development and implementation.

Lucia is currently Senior Associate General Counsel at UnitedHealthcare, where she supervises a team that represents UnitedHealthcare in its work in large data transactions related to health information exchanges, health care transparency projects, and other data-driven health care innovation projects. She has served on the Governance Board of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Multi-Payer Claims data base project (2011-2013), and collaborated with health information exchanges and state agencies in their planning with payers.

Prior to joining UnitedHealthcare, Lucia was General Counsel at the non-profit Pacific Business Group on Health, where she oversaw the legal affairs and state policy initiatives for one of the nation’s oldest employer health care purchasing coalitions and its small group health insurance exchange, PacAdvantage. At PBGH, Lucia applied her 15 years of experience as an employee benefit attorney, in both compliance and litigation, and expanded her practice to include health care regulation, data transactions, health care reform, and HIPAA implementation. Before joining PBGH, she served as Stanford University’s benefits compliance officer.

Lucia has a BA from Mills College in Oakland, CA, and received her Juris Doctor summa cum laude from New York University School of Law in May 1989, where she was awarded the Order of the Coif. She is a member of the State Bar of California, the American Corporate Counsel Association, and the American Health Lawyers Association. Lucia has authored many articles and given many lectures. Most recently, she has been emphasizing the importance of cost and quality transparency in health care, and has been working on the complex issues of maintaining patient privacy while working to fully realize the potential of health information exchange for better patient care in a learning health care system.

Lucia will join ONC on October 20th. I know that you will all welcome her and help to make her transition as seamless and smooth as possible. She is ready to hit the ground running and is looking forward to getting to know everyone.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Kathryn Marchesini who has served as Acting Chief Privacy Officer over the past few months. Kathryn is an exceptional public servant, brilliant attorney and excellent manager. She has been and will continue to be a valued and invaluable member of our team.

Best,

kd

 

Karen B. DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc

National Coordinator

Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology

US Department of Health and Human Services

Source: Health and Human Services