Privacy Law, HIPAA, and Data Protection

Lauren B. Steinfeld serves as Chief Privacy Officer for Penn Medicine and Senior Advisor for Privacy for the University of Pennsylvania. In this position, Ms. Steinfeld leads and oversees the HIPAA compliance program and other privacy initiatives for Penn’s six hospitals, over 250 physician practices, and the School of Medicine research program. She works on institution-wide training, policy development, and systems monitoring initiatives as well as evaluating individual strategic partnerships with data sharing elements. Ms. Steinfeld previously served as Senior Advisor for Privacy and Compliance and as Chief Privacy Officer focusing on University-specific issues. In those positions, she created, for the first time in higher education, an infrastructure for an institution-wide privacy program. Ms. Steinfeld developed and implemented policies, procedures, risk assessment models, risk mitigation strategies and other initiatives to protect the privacy and security of personal information. She addressed issues in cloud computing, social media, electronic information, courseware, location data, internal information systems risk assessments, FERPA compliance, HIPAA compliance, and incident response. Ms. Steinfeld also helped create Penn’s infrastructure for its institutional compliance program, with components including a telephone and web-based hotline, non-retaliation, policy coordination and awareness, self-assessments in functional compliance areas, and reporting to senior leadership on priority compliance activities. Ms. Steinfeld is now teaching a Privacy Law course, with Professor Anita Allen at Penn Law. She will teach again this Spring with Professor Christopher Yoo. Prior to her work at Penn, Ms. Steinfeld worked at the Office of Management and Budget as the Associate Chief Counselor for Privacy. At OMB, Ms. Steinfeld helped the Clinton Administration develop the HIPAA medical privacy regulations. She was also responsible for a wide range of other privacy issues, including financial and online privacy, identity theft, genetic information, cybersecurity, government information systems, and tax data confidentiality.. Before arriving at OMB, Ms. Steinfeld served as Attorney Advisor to Federal Trade Commissioner Mozelle Thompson. As an advisor, she was involved in the legal and policy aspects of some of the first Internet- and privacy-related cases brought by the FTC. Ms. Steinfeld received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. She received her J.D. in 1992 from New York University School of Law.