ConsenSys Health Appoints Former HHS ONC Branch Chief, Debbie Bucci, as Chief Data Officer
WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#CDO–Today, ConsenSys Health, a ConsenSys Mesh portfolio company creating decentralized patient-centric healthcare networks, announced that it has appointed Debbie Bucci to serve as Chief Data Officer (CDO), focusing on the utilization and governance of patient health and health-relevant information across the company’s forthcoming Data Integrity and Learning Networks (DILNs).
Bucci has served as the company’s Technical Director, Patient-Mediated and Institutional Data Exchange since its venture-backed spin-off from larger blockchain concern, ConsenSys, on March 2nd, 2020. In her new CDO role, she will lead the company’s efforts related to data quality, data governance, master data management, information strategy, and data science. In particular, Bucci’s team will oversee the collection, analysis, protection, use, and dissemination of confidential health information processed by ConsenSys Health in its aim to accelerate the industry’s advancement toward the learning health system vision.
Bucci has decades of experience in the healthcare information technology space, including most recently at the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), where she served as Branch Chief, Privacy and Security Office of Technology, Standards Division. An early visionary in the blockchain space, while at ONC Bucci was a prime mover behind the 2016 white paper challenge that helped launch this worldwide industry.
Before ONC, Bucci held leadership positions at the United States 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, her key contributions included serving as Program Lead for the Integration Services Center, an interoperable middleware initiative that provided integration services between financial and grant systems in support of the broader life science research community. Bucci was also the Program Manager for NIH iTrust, the first fully-federated gateway validation and single sign-on (SSO) service in the United States Federal government. NIH iTrust was an acclaimed Federal service, a winner of the NIH Director’s Award, the InfoWeek Top 20 Federal Innovators Award, and the Kantara Identity Deployment of the Year (IDDY) Award.
“I am passionate about extending my professional experience with health data integration and interoperability to enable a next generation industry data architecture. We are at an inflection point where it is impossible to ignore data decentralization approaches. 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,” says Debbie Bucci, now CDO at ConsenSys Health.
The CDO role is an emerging executive leadership role where a key function is to govern the usage of health information. CDOs manage how healthcare provider and payer organizations access data, harmonize data definitions across data models, identify and integrate new data sources, and work to ensure the healthcare delivery system as a whole continuously improves data availability, quality and integrity.
At the United States Federal level, the importance of the CDO role has been recognized through the creation by statute of the Federal Data Council via the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018. Drawing on her extensive public sector experience, Bucci will play a key role engaging with the Council and its agency members to elevate and clarify long-standing healthcare information issues due for reconsideration in the rapidly advancing decentralized technology paradigm, such as patient privacy assurance, self-sovereign identity, transaction-specific fine-grained consent and delegations of authority, automation of data standardization and normalization, verifying AI training data provenance and AI explainability, federated-first decentralized data architectures, and more.
“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. 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. This is ultimately about unblocking each patient’s ability to create personalized clinical value through the privacy-preserving aggregation, curation, and monetization of decentralized self-sovereign data. This is a primary function of our Data Integrity and Learning Networks (DILNs), beginning with the Veterans Incentivized Coordination and Integration (VICI) DILN, undertaken in partnership with Dixon Center for Military and Veterans Services and the Linux Foundation Public Health,” adds Heather Leigh Flannery, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ConsenSys Health.
About ConsenSys Health
ConsenSys Health, a ConsenSys Mesh portfolio company, is building next generation critical infrastructure for healthcare and life sciences. Their Elevated ComputeTM platform, leveraging decentralized AI, blockchain and confidential computing, is implemented to form Data Integrity and Learning Networks (DILNs)™ that address chronic industry pain points. A founding member of the Decentralized Trials & Research Alliance (DTRA), ConsenSys Health is focused on privacy-preserving clinical trials matching, e-consent, and precision medicine applications. They partner with advocacy groups to prioritize enhancing the wellbeing of underserved populations. Consensyshealth.com.
Contacts
MEDIA CONTACT:
Pete Harris
pete.harris@consensyshealth.com
917.379.7287