The Department of Health and Human Services named attorney Joy Pritts its chief privacy officer at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

Pritts, an expert in health privacy and a assistant professor at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute, will advise David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for HIT, on how to keep patients' confidential information safe and secure as the office speeds up electronic health record adoption, as mandated by the HITECH Act. She was appointed Feb. 16.

Pritts is the ONC's inaugural privacy officer, a position called for by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to help oversee implementation of provisions in the HITECH Act.

Pritts, co-author of The State of Health Privacy: An Uneven Terrain, is an authority on health privacy and was senior counsel for the Health Privacy Project, now part of the Center for Democracy and Technology. According to Georgetown's website, her current research focus is on HIPAA privacy rules and how insurance companies and other financial institutions use access to medical information.

Pritts holds a JD from Case Western Research University School of Law.

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