The Health Care Law practice group wrapped up 2021 with the annual Health Care Law update on December 9. Co-Chairs Neha Mahendra Matta, vice president, general counsel and chief privacy officer with The Health Collaborative, and Brian Higgins, managing associate with Frost Brown Todd, chatted about the challenges and opportunities ahead for the group and the health care law profession.
Higgins: I became a member of the Healthcare Law practice group in early 2017, right after I joined Frost. I wanted to become chair of the group because I saw an opportunity to interact with other healthcare lawyers and professionals within the healthcare industry. I like the idea of trying to present our membership with different opportunities to learn about new changes in healthcare laws, and also from other service professionals in the healthcare industry. I want to bring them into the fold and give them the opportunity to educate our members not only on changes to the law, but changes to the services they provide.
Matta: I started as secretary in 2019. I thought it was a cool opportunity because I think working at the Health Collaborative is a really unique organization. We are part information exchange, part IT help and data analytics. My job is really focused on data sharing and how to ensure that protected health information is shared as expansively as possible within the law. And in my role, I have the opportunity to interact with all the healthcare, health system legal departments as well as individual providers, as well as skilled nursing facilities, to just a broad range of health care providers and stakeholders. I feel like the healthcare community in Cincinnati is super, super small, so this really gives us an opportunity to get to know one another and meet one another and lean on one another as resources.
Matta: I graduated from UC Law in 2010 and from there I practiced insurance defense litigation for a Fortune 500 company in-house and moved to a private law firm doing the same thing. In 2017, I came back home and now I’m vice president and general counsel at the Health Collaborative.
Higgins: I graduated from UC Law in 2015 and I was an in-house attorney at MedPace for one year and then I moved to Frost Brown Todd and I’ve been on the healthcare team now since 2017.
Higgins: We bring in folks who are part of the professional services industry. Healthcare consulting firms will come in and give talks. Recently, we had someone come in and talk about fair market value assessments in healthcare because that’s very important and highly regulated. If you’re ever getting involved in a transaction with a doctor you have to make sure the price is actual fair market value, you’re not paying over that or less than that. In my practice, I just sort of get those numbers, but I don’t really know the how or why they come up with those figures, and that’s obviously very important to our clients and so it was just good for us to learn about.
Matta: The Health Collaborative has been in the forefront of COVID because we are a health information exchange. A huge part of my job was everyone wanted the COVID data, how can we share COVID data within the legal limits, how do we get health systems to agree to share COVID data and honestly it was actually very easy. We were lucky to have a healthcare community that was just ready to help and share data with one another in order to ensure we had a plan and we were ready if there were certain triggers that were met. I think everyone really struggled with that in terms of, ‘How do we share COVID data within the confines of HIPAA and how can HIPAA be expanded? What amendments can be made and that’s going on right now?’
Higgins: I think the government is trying to protect patient information, but also give access to it to a variety of different providers, because I think they realize, as a collective whole, that all these different sophisticated healthcare organizations have data about patients, and they can aggregate that and use it. Whether it’s running algorithms or AI, they can find out better [ways] to treat patients. I think that’s the balance the law is trying to strike, and also to help further treatments for patients.