Health IT Vendor Appoints Former ONC Branch Chief as CDO

Health IT vendor ConsenSys Health has appointed former ONC branch chief Debbie Bucci to serve as chief data officer (CDO).

Bucci previously served as the health IT vendor’s technical director of patient-mediated and institutional data exchange. In her new role, she will lead the company’s data quality, data governance, master data management, and information strategy initiatives.

More specifically, Bucci’s team will oversee the collection, analysis, protection, use, and exchange of confidential health information to accelerate the industry’s move toward the vision of the learning health system.

A learning health system is a closed loop clinical decision support model that combines current evidence, clinical experience, and data analytics to accelerate the creation of clinical guidelines.

Prior to her tenure at ConsenSys Health, Bucci served as branch chief of the ONC privacy and security office of technology in the standards division.

Before ONC, Bucci held leadership positions at the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

At NIST, she was a Program Advisor for the National Strategies for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) Program Office.

While at NIH, Bucci served as program lead for the integration services center, an interoperable initiative that provided integration services between grant and financial systems in support of the life science research community.

“I am passionate about extending my professional experience with health data integration and interoperability to enable a next generation industry data architecture,” Bucci said in a press release.

“We are at an inflection point where it is impossible to ignore data decentralization approaches,” she added. “As such, we have the opportunity to create a new, more equitable and inclusive data economy that benefits public and private healthcare and life science enterprises and patients everywhere.”

The CDO role is an emerging executive role where the key function is to govern the usage of health information. CDOs manage how healthcare organizations access data, identify and integrate new data sources, and work to ensure the healthcare delivery system as a whole continuously improves data availability, quality and integrity.

“It is my honor to recognize Debbie’s substantive contributions to the industry and to ConsenSys Health and to further empower her in this strategic new role,” said Heather Leigh Flannery, founder and chief executive officer of ConsenSys Health.

“Her tremendous range of experience at HHS and NIST, including her work with the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) and other aspects of the 21st Century Cures Act, makes her uniquely qualified to inform our continuously evolving offerings at the intersection of multiple families of emerging technology and health data,” she added.