Datavant Announces Privacy, Security, and Public Policy Leadership Team Expansion

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 27, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Datavant, the leader in helping healthcare organizations safely connect their data to improve medical research and patient care, today announced the appointments of Aden Fine as General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer and Dongting Yu as Head of Security Engineering. Datavant also announced the appointments of David Shulkin and Andrew von Eschenbach to its Policy Advisory Board.

“Data has the potential to improve patient outcomes, reduce cost, and enhance medical research. Establishing a secure infrastructure for the exchange of de-identified health information is one of the most important challenges of our era,” said Datavant CEO Travis May. “As Datavant’s ecosystem continues to grow, these additions to the team will help us further scale our privacy and security architecture — further strengthening the protections for the patient data being used to advance medical research and improve patient outcomes.”

Appointment of Aden Fine as General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer

Throughout his career, Aden has worked to address some of the most challenging legal issues in technology and privacy, first practicing IP law at several law firms, then as a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, and later as General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer of Edmodo and Everalbum. Aden received his BA in Political Science from Stanford University and his JD from Harvard Law School.

“What’s most exciting to me about Datavant is that the protection of patient privacy is built directly into the product,” said Mr. Fine. “I have been following the company since its founding, and have been impressed with the rapid growth of its health data ecosystem and how the company has brought together so many disparate data sets for such a wide variety of analytical use cases. I look forward to helping Datavant scale its vision across the entire healthcare system, and to ensuring that patient benefit and patient privacy remain at the heart of the company’s mission.”

Appointment of Dongting Yu as Head of Security Engineering

Dongting joins Datavant from Rescale, a multi-cloud high performance computing platform, where he led the security and compliance team and led the implementation of FedRAMP compliance. Dongting holds a BS in Computer Science from McGill University, and a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University, where he focused on network security.

Formation of Policy Advisory Board

Dr. Shulkin is the former U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs, appointed by President Obama and serving under both President Obama and President Trump. He previously served as President of the Atlantic Health System; as President and Chief Executive Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; and held various executive roles at Temple University; Drexel University School of Medicine; Medical College of Pennsylvania; DoctorQuality, Inc.; and the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Dr. Shulkin holds an MD from the Medical College of Pennsylvania.

Dr. von Eschenbach is the current President at Samaritan Health Initiatives, and the former Commissioner of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, appointed by President George W. Bush and serving under both President Bush and President Obama. He previously served as a Director at the National Cancer Institute and Executive Vice President & Chief Academic Officer at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. von Eschenbach holds an MD from the Georgetown University School of Medicine.

Dr. Shulkin and Dr. von Eschenbach will be advising Datavant on a variety of business matters, including evolving health data policy, regulation, compliance, and government affairs.

About Datavant

Datavant’s mission is to connect the world’s health data to improve patient outcomes. Datavant works with data owners and users to ensure that data can be connected to power next-generation analytics and applications while protecting patient privacy. Datavant is headquartered in San Francisco. Learn more about Datavant at www.datavant.com.