Chief Privacy Officer

Joy Pritts, J.D., has been named the first chief privacy officer within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. She received her law degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law, where she was an associate editor of the law review, and her bachelor's degree from Oberlin College.

Pritts formerly was on the faculty at Georgetown University, where she held a joint appointment as a senior scholar with the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and as a research associate professor with the Health Policy Institute, where her research focuses on consumers' rights with respect to their health information. Her research encompasses a broad range of topics including the implementation of the Federal Health Privacy Rule (also known as the HIPAA Privacy Rule), state health information privacy and access laws, the interplay of the federal and state privacy laws, and the access to and use of medical information by financial institutions. She is the primary author of The State of Health Privacy, a 50-state survey of health information privacy statutes, as well as a series of consumer guides that explain in plain English how consumers can obtain their medical records in a post-HIPAA environment.

She has testified numerous times before Congress and the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics on health information privacy issues. She currently serves on the Privacy and Security Advisory Team guiding the AHRQ-funded nation-wide assessment of state health privacy laws and practices. She is also a member of the Markle Foundation's Connecting for Health Workgroup on Consumer Access to Health Information Exchange. She served on the technical advisory panel for the multi-state Health Information Security and Privacy Collaborative and as a board member of the National Governors Association's State Alliance for e-Health.