Dianne Bourque

Dianne Bourque is a healthcare attorney in Holland & Knight's Boston office who focuses on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), health information privacy and data security, as well as clinical research and life sciences regulatory issues.

Ms. Bourque advises a variety of healthcare industry clients on a broad range of regulatory issues, including data acquisition and use in artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm training, research, product development and digital health applications. She also advises providers on risk management and patient care matters.

As former in-house counsel to an academic medical center, a large part of Ms. Bourque's practice involves counseling researchers and research sponsors in matters related to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) regulated clinical research, including consent, access to and use of tissue and associated patient information, expanded access to investigational products and the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process.

In addition, Ms. Bourque counsels healthcare clients and other business entities on a broad range of privacy and data security issues, including HIPAA, 42 C.F.R. Part 2 and state- imposed medical privacy laws. She regularly assists clients with incident response and mitigation, including large-scale data breaches, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) audits and investigations, third-party requests for information, review of HIPAA-related contracts and forms, and privacy-related due diligence. She has successfully defended clients in civil and criminal HIPAA enforcement actions and serves as an expert witness in HIPAA-related litigation.

Prior to joining Holland & Knight, Ms. Bourque worked for a national law firm in Boston. She was an associate staff attorney at a large academic medical center outside of Boston, where she provided general counsel services to medical, professional and administrative staff. She also served as counsel to the hospital's IRB, Ethics Committee, Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer Committee, and the Genetics Advisory Board.

Ms. Bourque was the first Suffolk University Law School student to graduate with a concentration in Health and Biomedical Law. She formerly served as an adjunct professor at Stonehill College, teaching an undergraduate course on healthcare law and is a guest lecturer in the Boston College MS in Cybersecurity, Policy and Governance program and at Boston University Law School.