ONC gets new privacy officer
The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT has hired a new chief privacy officer.
ONC chief, Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, announced that Lucia Savage, JD, will join the agency on Oct. 20. Savage currently is 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, healthcare transparency projects and other data-driven healthcare innovation projects, according to an announcement. She has served on the Governance Board of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Multi-Payer Claims database project (2011-2013), and collaborated with health information exchanges and state agencies in their planning with payers.
Prior to joining UnitedHealthcare, Savage was general counsel at the non-profit Pacific Business Group on Health (PBGH), where she oversaw the legal affairs and state policy initiatives for one of the nation’s oldest employer healthcare purchasing coalitions and its small group health insurance exchange, PacAdvantage. She also applied her experience as an employee benefit attorney and expanded her practice to include healthcare regulation, data transactions, healthcare reform and HIPAA implementation. Before joining PBGH, she served as Stanford University’s benefits compliance officer.
She is a member of the State Bar of California, the American Corporate Counsel Association and the American Health Lawyers Association. Savage has authored many articles and given many lectures. Most recently, she has been emphasizing the importance of cost and quality transparency in healthcare, 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 healthcare system.
Savage "brings to our team a set of rich experiences at the intersection of health information, privacy and modernizing the healthcare 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," DeSalvo wrote in a message to ONC staff.
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.