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Angela Oren, JD, is the Yale School of Medicine’s new senior deputy privacy officer and risk management administrator. She arrived highly recommended for the job, which she says “fits like a glove.”

Her experience includes working as a regulatory analyst for the Yale School of Medicine Human Investigation Committee, and as system privacy officer and HIPAA project director for Yale New Haven Health System. Before relocating to the East Coast, Oren attended Thurgood Marshall School of Law, practiced law for several years, and then served as the billing and regulatory compliance officer at Harris County Psychiatric Center, a component of the University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHSC).

Once Oren began working in the health care field, she said, “I was hooked. There are always new regulations, new challenges and opportunities to make a difference in people’s lives.”

In December 2000, when the final version of the privacy standards was published, Oren was responsible for the UTHSC’s HIPAA compliance program. She wrote policies, procedures and training materials to incorporate the new regulations into existing processes. She also provided legal and regulatory advice and developed training presentations for implementation of the HIPAA Security Rule. “At the time, there was a lot of anxiety in the industry about how the regulations would affect patient care and clinical research. Our implementation team worked very hard—and successfully, I think—to make sure that clinical efficacy and common sense always prevailed,” she said.

When Oren and her husband decided to move to the New York metropolitan area, they consulted a relocation website to help narrow their choices. Their ideal community, as it turned out, was New Haven.

Soon Oren began work at the Yale New Haven Health System. “The system had already done a great job implementing the Privacy Rule, but the Security standards, which came two years later, imposed new obligations, principally on the IT department, but also on nearly all clinical and administrative staff,” she explained. So the challenge was to try to renew the heightened awareness that had existed during the original privacy implementation. After this, Oren was offered a position with the Yale School of Medicine Human Investigation Committee. While she was between jobs, Oren saw the posting for the HIPAA position at Yale. “I loved working at Yale, and the job’s requirements perfectly matched my experience,” she said.

On campus now for almost a month, Oren said she enjoys learning the workings of all of the Yale School of Medicine’s departments. Asked what she would like to be known for after completing her first year, she said, “I made it easier for my colleagues to safeguard their patients’ privacy. Complying with HIPAA is its own reward. We all want to believe that our health information is safe in the hands of our health care providers, and the surest way to have confidence in the confidentiality of health information is to treat patient information with the respect that we hope is accorded to our own medical records.”