As legal chief of healthcare ad tech company DeepIntent, Yashina Burns helps her clients cope with the “headache” caused by diverse privacy rules for patients and their prescription drug data.
Burns was named Rising Star at the Business Journal’s General Counsel Awards held Nov. 14 at the Irvine Marriott.
DeepIntent helps pharmaceutical companies place targeted ads on connected TV, mobile phones, browsing on desktops and “anything connected to the Internet,” while also collecting information on who’s using healthcare pharmaceuticals.
While her job as an in-house company lawyer includes virtually everything — from DeepIntent’s employment policy to legal strategy, patents and contracts — health-data privacy may be the most difficult.
Burns, whose title is senior vice president for privacy and legal affairs, says the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump will be an “interesting time” with talk of potential deregulation.
More Aggressive Privacy Enforcement
“At the same time, it might mean that state entities, state regulators are going to be more aggressive enforcing their specific state privacy laws,” she told the Business Journal on Nov. 19.
Some state laws are “much more aggressive than others in trying to regulate certain types of data including data they think is health adjacent.”
The Irvine resident has been building out privacy compliance frameworks for DeepIntent, which was founded in 2016.
“That’s one of our biggest risk factors within the company,” she said. “Our clients and the industry as a whole feel a bit of a headache in dealing with the current regulatory landscape, which includes a patchwork of about 20 state privacy laws.
“They’re certainly not enjoying the growth of state-specific laws.”
She said there are “murmurs” of a federal privacy law, but there is skepticism about that actually happening.
While the various regulations cover drug makers and advertisers, New York-based DeepIntent doesn’t use the data directly.
UWashington, UCI Law School
Burns holds a Bachelor of Arts in Law, Societies and Justice from the University of Washington and a JD degree from the University of California, Irvine School of Law. She joined DeepIntent in June 2017.
Burns, who works remotely, supervises two other attorneys and a paralegal and works on product development, marketing, legal strategies, client strategies, contracting and patents.
Privately held DeepIntent has about 300 employees.
The company makes its money from the pharmaceutical companies and advertising agencies that use its platform and services.
In December, a federal judge upheld a Federal Trade Commission order that blocked IQVIA (NYSE: IQV), a North Carolina-based analytics and research company, from acquiring DeepIntent, saying the takeover could have harmed competition. That deal is now off the table, according to Burns.
She said that DeepIntent may still be acquired somewhere down the road, but nothing is definite.
“We’ve had one of our best years yet,” she says of the company.
