Data Confidentiality and Privacy Architect

Company Overview

With an annual budget of $2.3 billion and more than 7,000 employees throughout the five boroughs, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH) is one of the largest public health agencies in the world, serving 8 million New Yorkers from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. We're tackling a broad range of public health issues with innovative policies and programs and getting exceptional results, but our work is never finished.

The breadth of our innovative programs provides the widest range of choices for every member of our team.

The selected candidate will be an employee of Public Health Solutions, a nonprofit organization which is the fiscal and administrative manager of the grant, but work will be supervised by DOHMH.

The Center for Population Health Data Science (CPHDS) – launched in October of 2023 – aims to catalyze critical data modernization work and enable the agency to make progress toward linking public health, healthcare, and social service fortimely and effective public action. We are working towards making these data more accessible, timely, equitable, meaningfully usable, and protected – and actively used to protect and promote the health and well-being of New Yorkers.

We aim to strengthen agency-wide data capabilities by empowering our workforce, enhancing intra‑ and inter‑agency data sharing, and using modern technology to yield trusted and integrated data and insights. A real‑time and comprehensive view of city needs is needed to enhance public health actions and improve health outcomes for the most vulnerable New Yorkers. This position will be based at the Health Department’s office in Long Island City, NY, with the possibility of hybrid work.

• Develop and implement privacy‑by‑design processes to maintain the confidentiality of line‑listed and tabular data while maximizing the utility of the data, including risk assessment, risk mitigation, and utility assessment on agency datasets, systems, and processes.
• Advance efforts working toward/implementing FAIR data principles, NIST standards, Safe Harbor standards, and others in alignment with agency and City policies.
• Understand and operationalize confidentiality regulations and policies while implementing Data Risk Management processes on confidential datasets.
• Identify, assess, and make recommendations for Data Risk Management techniques on confidential agency datasets, including differential privacy.
• Collaborate with agency data stewards, analysts and stakeholders of confidential datasets to provide a comprehensive understanding of needed or required Data Risk Management.
• Optimize Data Risk Management workflows.
• Research and maintain working knowledge of current and evolving risk mitigation methods to preserve privacy (e.g., generating and evaluating synthetic data) as applied to clinical and public health data.
• Implement privacy‑preserving methods in health records that are maintained in electronic health records and other formats.
• Document methods and engineering processes implemented to support Data Risk Management.
• Develop compliance standards and monitoring processes for data governance requirements by users of agency data assets.
• Interpret federal, state, and local data privacy, security, and confidentiality requirements and translate them into clear implementation specifications for data architects, engineers, and governance teams.
• Communicate policy requirements and governance standards to technical teams and translate technical limitations, risks, and tradeoffs to policy and leadership stakeholders to inform and influence system design and data use decisions.
• Review proposed data flows, integrations, and use cases to identify privacy and confidentiality risks and recommend mitigation strategies.

• Master’s degree or higher in Data Science, Statistics, Epidemiology, or related field.
• Background and experience with Data Risk Management methods.
• Experience with clinical and public health data governance and data protection regulations.
• Strong analytical thinking and problem‑solving abilities.
• Flexibility to adapt to evolving project requirements…