Valita Fredland is stepping into the triple role of vice president, general counsel and privacy officer at the Indiana Health Information Exchange, the largest HIE in the country revealed Monday.
Fredland will oversee the privacy and security concerns of IHIE’s coalition of 150 hospitals, payers and other healthcare related entities as well as IHIE’s nine billion pieces of clinical data.
She will also employ the patient privacy prism to help inform the organization’s business strategy and governance and compliance policies.
“Bar none, there is no one better than Valita to help us continue to navigate the most important aspect of our business, and that is maintaining patient privacy,” said IHIE President and CEO John Kansky in a statement.
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Fredland’s perspective will help inform IHIE’s strategic direction with a focus on novel ways to support interoperability, he added.
Fourteen years ago, Fredland created a multidisciplinary Privacy and Security Council to discuss healthcare industry trends and to predict and respond to risks related to sensitive data. This group has broad job function participation from clinical and IT, to social workers and policy writers.
Fredland is member of the board of the Indiana Security and Privacy Network, a local professional group that works to provide continuing education on data privacy and security across industries in Indiana.
“As a privacy professional, my goal is to respect individual privacy expectations while supporting efforts to use data to improve population health and envision the healthcare system of the future,” Fredland said in a statement.
Most recently, Fredland served as chief privacy officer and counsel at IU Health. She also served as a senior affiliate faculty member with the Charles Warren Fairbanks Center for Medical Ethics, as a content expert for the fellowship in clinical ethics.
Fredland is an adjunct faculty member at Indiana University/Purdue University, most recently teaching a graduate level course on HIPAA/HITECH and data privacy laws in the Department of Biohealth Informatics.
Twitter: @Bernie_HITN
Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com
