Authors

Dr. Karen B. DeSalvo

Portrait of Dr. Karen B. DeSalvo

Dr. Karen DeSalvo is a physician who has served as a leader through her 20-year career toward improving access to affordable, high quality care for all people with a focus on vulnerable populations through her direct care, medical education and administrative roles. Before coming to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, she was the New Orleans Health Commissioner and New Orleans Mayor Mitchell Landrieu’s Senior Health Policy Advisor.

Before joining the Mayor’s administration, Dr. DeSalvo was a professor of medicine and vice dean for community affairs and health policy at Tulane University School of Medicine.

Following Hurricane Katrina, she created an innovative model of neighborhood-based primary care and mental health services for low-income, uninsured and other vulnerable individuals, and was the founder and president of 504HealthNet, a consortium of safety net providers in the New Orleans region.

Dr. DeSalvo served as president of the Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum and the National Association of Chiefs of General Internal Medicine. She has served on the boards of the National Association of County and City Health Officials and the Society of General Internal Medicine.

Dr. DeSalvo was recognized as one of “Women of Excellence in Health Care” by the Louisiana Legislative Women’s Caucus and named a “Children’s Hero” by the Children’s Bureau of New Orleans and Family Service of New Orleans named her as one of their Ten Outstanding Persons. In 2013, Governing Magazine named Dr. DeSalvo one of nine Public Officials of the Year.

She earned her Medical Doctorate and Master’s in Public Health from Tulane University, and Master’s in Clinical Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Karen B. DeSalvo's Latest Blog Posts

An Opportunity for Sharing Information about Cyber Attacks

Dr. Karen B. DeSalvo | July 25, 2016

To better prevent attacks on health information technology, organizations need better visibility into what to expect and how to respond. Timely information on the nature of attacks is critical to that ability. To enable better dissemination of threat information, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) released two Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) to build the capacity of an Information Sharing and Analysis Organization (ISAO).

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Examining Oversight of the Privacy & Security of Health Data Collected by Entities Not Regulated by HIPAA

Dr. Karen B. DeSalvo | July 19, 2016

Many of us now use wearables and other types of health information technology to help us manage our health and the health of our loved ones. These fitness trackers, their related social media sites where individuals share health information, and other technologies are changing the way we interact and control our own health. However, they did not exist when Congress originally enacted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996.

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Empowering Patients: New Videos to Promote Access to Electronic Health Information

Dr. Karen B. DeSalvo | June 2, 2016

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released a HIPAA fact sheet earlier this year reinforcing patients’ right to access their health information and clarifying, among other things, that patients may be charged only limited fees for copies of their health information.  Many people are not fully aware of their right to access their own medical records under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), including the right to access an electronic copy when their health information is stored electronically.

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A Foundation for Discovering Clinical Health IT Applications

Dr. Karen B. DeSalvo | June 1, 2016

Every day across America, health information technology (health IT) professionals and development teams are creating interoperability solutions using application programming interfaces (APIs). As this surge of innovation grows with each passing year, the likelihood that teams across the nation are creating similar or duplicative health IT applications is also increasing. Unfortunately, our capability to search for, discover, compare, and test existing applications has been limited and this lack of available information may contribute to a lag in the diffusion of innovation across the health IT application ecosystem.

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