Page 13 - January-February-CBA-Report

Journey Advisory Group is proud to announce the selection of its Chief Investment Officer
ERIC PETTWAY, CFA CFA Society Cincinnati President
Investments & Planning for Your Life’s Journey
JOURNEYADVISORY.GROUP
TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND.
Matta: I graduated from UC Law in 2010 and from there I practiced insur- ance 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 pres- ident 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.
WHAT CONVERSATIONS DO YOU LIKE TO HAVE WITH YOUR MEMBERS?
Higgins: We bring in folks who are part of the professional services industry. Health- care 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.
TWO YEARS INTO THE PANDEMIC, HOW HAS YOUR PRACTICE BEEN AFFECTED? ANY ENSUING LEGAL ISSUES?
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 amend- ments 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.
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