Health-e Law Podcast Ep. 14
The Future (of Healthcare) is Female with Danielle Vrabie and Amanda Zablocki, Co-Chairs of Sheppard Mullin’s WHLC
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Welcome to Health-e Law, Sheppard Mullin's podcast exploring the fascinating health tech topics and trends of the day. In this episode, Danielle Vrabie and Amanda Zablocki, partners at Sheppard Mullin and Co-Chairs of the firm’s Women in Healthcare Leadership Collaborative (WHLC), join Sara Shanti to talk about the importance of elevating women to leadership roles in healthcare.
About Danielle Vrabie
Danielle Vrabie is a partner in the Litigation Practice Group in Sheppard Mullin’s New York office and a member of the firm’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Teams.
Danielle represents corporate clients and individuals in complex commercial litigation and government investigations throughout the country. A substantial portion of her practice is dedicated to serving healthcare and life sciences clients, including hospitals and health systems, physician and specialty practice groups, managed care organizations, pharmaceutical companies, long-term care providers, and medical device companies. She has experience representing these clients in a variety of contexts, including commercial disputes and litigation, enforcement actions, and government investigations. She also has significant experience defending against investigations and litigation involving allegations under the False Claims Act, Stark Law, Anti-Kickback Statute, and similar anti-fraud statutes. In this context, she also assists companies in conducting internal investigations regarding allegations of fraud, employee misconduct, and whistleblower complaints and developing cost-effective and practical compliance and risk management programs.
Danielle also helped establish and serves as Co-Chair of WHLC, which seeks to promote the advancement of women in the healthcare industry by bringing them together in a supportive community and providing them with targeted education focused on complex legal issues, healthcare innovation, and other critical issues.
About Amanda Zablocki
A partner in Sheppard Mullin’s New York office, Amanda Zablocki is a trusted legal and strategic advisor to healthcare organizations across the country, helping them achieve their goals while navigating a dynamic regulatory landscape.
Amanda leads complex healthcare deals, including mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and strategic partnerships, corporate reorganizations, and value-based care arrangements. She routinely advises on a range of healthcare and nonprofit regulatory matters, including fraud, waste, and abuse, the corporate practice of medicine, nonprofit law, tax exemption, corporate governance, and compliance matters. Her clients conclude health plans and health insurers, hospitals, academic medical centers, digital health and healthcare technology companies, integrated healthcare delivery systems, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, rare disease organizations, independent practice associations, physician practices, management services organizations, value-based enterprises, care management organizations, and 501(c)(3) organizations.
In addition to helping found and serving as Co-Chair of WHLC, Amanda has devoted substantial time to supporting the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women in the legal industry. She served as Co-Chair of the New York Women Lawyers’ Group (WLG) for several years before joining the firm’s WLG National Leadership Council. In her role as Chair of Sheppard Mullin’s New York Recruiting Committee, Amanda cultivates the next generation of attorneys through the firm’s highly ranked summer associate program.
About Sara Shanti
A partner in the Corporate Practice Group in the Sheppard Mullin's Chicago office and co-lead of its Digital Health Team, Sara Shanti’s practice sits at the forefront of healthcare technology by providing practical counsel on novel innovation and complex data privacy matters. Using her medical research background and HHS experience, Sara advises providers, payors, start-ups, technology companies, and their investors and stakeholders on digital healthcare and regulatory compliance matters, including artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), gamification, implantable and wearable devices, and telehealth.
At the cutting edge of advising on "data as an asset" programming, Sara's practice supports investment in innovation and access to care initiatives, including mergers and acquisitions involving crucial, high-stakes and sensitive data, medical and wellness devices, and web-based applications and care.
Transcript:
Sara Shanti:
Welcome to Health-e Law. I'm Sara Shanti, a healthcare partner with Sheppard Mullin, and I have the pleasure of hosting today's episode. I'm also pleased to be joined by Danielle Vrabi and Amanda Zablocki, my esteemed law partners in New York, and who serve as the co-chairs of the Women in Healthcare Leadership Collaborative, also known as WHLC. Thanks so much for joining us today, Danielle and Amanda.
Amanda Zablocki:
Thanks for having us.
Danielle Vrabie:
Thanks for having us.
Sara Shanti:
We are going to start with a little bit of a disturbing fact, and that's that women make up about 75% of entry-level positions in healthcare. However, from there, their career succession really plummets, with representation falling to approximately 32% at the executive levels. Of that 32%, less than 5% are women of color. And I know that about six years ago, in working to support your diverse clientele in healthcare and all of their legal needs, you saw that that industry had an incredible problem but also opportunity to do more in this space with elevating women in healthcare. And you took action by forming Sheppard Mullin's Women in Healthcare Leadership Collaborative, WHLC. So could you talk a little bit today about WHLC’s incredible mission and its evolving growth and what that really means to this industry?
Danielle Vrabie:
Yeah, so thank you, Sara. And you're right, those statistics are really shocking, particularly given that we start with all of these wonderfully talented women in the entry-level positions, and they sort of seem to dwindle at significant rates much more than any other industry. And one of the interesting things in the study that we were reading that came out about this at the time, before we started WHLC, was that women really lacked a peer network. So they were looking around at people who were holding the C-suite and senior-level positions, and they didn't see people who looked like them, people they can go into their office, shut the door and ask for advice and learn from. So that was one of the contributing factors for why it was they were looking for different career paths and exiting the field.
And Amanda and I, who we practice in very different areas. I'm on the litigation side in the healthcare space, Amanda's on the corporate side, but we have been a great support to each other in our careers and so we thought, "Why don't we just bring these people together? They seem to lack a network. It's what they really, really want. We have access to all of these wonderful clients that we serve. Let's just bring them together in a room and see what happens." And I think that's really from where WHLC was born.
Sara Shanti:
Last month, you hosted your first annual leadership summit in our New York offices in 30 Rock. And I know you brought, it was really intentional about getting women in the room together, women from different corners of the industry, some of the brightest, most innovative legal minds, professional minds in healthcare. Amanda, could you talk a little bit about what the focus really was of the summit and what it was like to be in the room with all of those incredible women leaders?
Amanda Zablocki:
Oh, gosh, it was energizing, to say the least. So the focus this year was on value-based care. It is a topic that every sector of the industry is really grappling with. How do we do it well? How do we navigate a very challenging dynamic and sometimes contradictory regulatory and enforcement landscape in this context to really transition away from the old fee-for-service model, which everyone knows does not really work, towards this value-based care model?
So we brought experts from the pharmacy space, from the hospital system space, from health plans, value-based care organizations to talk about what are the types of partnerships that are most effective? What are the innovations that they see driving the industry forward in value-based care? How they've successfully implemented value-based care within their organizations. And then we took a broader view of what are the regulatory and enforcement considerations when entering into value-based care arrangements, with a deeper dive into each of the antitrust and regulatory enforcement and other areas implicated by value-based care.
We capped the day off with a really cool whiteboarding session where we've all been sitting in the room, hearing each other talk about these issues. And that whiteboarding session was an opportunity to revisit those topics from earlier in the day and talk about how did each attendee viewed those issues. How did it impact them? What opportunities did they identify? What challenges did they see new solutions for?
So we broke up into smaller groups and there was really engaging discussion throughout that session around solutions and how to work together. In the room over the course of the day and the evening prior, there were real partnerships made. We had attendees come up to us during the event to say, "I met this person at this company. We should have been doing business together a long time ago. I'm so glad I finally had the opportunity to connect."
And I know Danielle had a great tidbit about one of the takeaways from our attendees who's in leadership, I'll let her talk about that. But I think it was just such a meaningful discussion. And by the way, not about women's health. Just because we're women getting together in a room, it wasn't about a women's issue. It was about these incredibly intelligent, brilliant women getting in a room, talking about things that matter to us all and how to move the industry forward.
Danielle Vrabie:
Thank you, Amanda. I really do love it because we had one of the attendees come up to us after the conference, a senior level woman at a big health system, and she said to us, "You know, I was thinking about why I felt so good in the room." And she's like, "I think it's because they're all women here. And you sort of let your guard down," she said, in a way that she hasn't really been able to do in other conferences where she walks into a room and there's all these men standing around, talking to each other and she feels excluded. And she said, "I was never alone here. There was always somebody talking to me, the conversation was going, and it felt like there was just a bond in that room that you don't really get at conferences."
And that is exactly, when Amanda and I first started WHLC, we talked about the idea of a summit. We never knew if we would ever get to the point where we could actually host one of these. And that's exactly the vision that we had for this summit, and to hear her say that was really incredible. It was a proof of concept. These things work and they matter.
And to Amanda's point, we weren't in there talking about women's health issues. We were just talking and trying to learn from each other, and nobody had to put on any sort of airs about it. And that was really, really wonderful to see and experience.
Sara Shanti:
That is so incredible because I think it just shows that there's all these untapped resources too, that might be sitting at your table, that just because of the circumstance or the temperature in the room, are going unheard. And then to create that space so that voices can really rise, and new ideas and partnerships can be made just because of how you've created the environment is just really telling.
So that's a perfect segue into kind of taking a step back and looking at the reason WHLC was created and established in response to gender disparity in these huge institutions. But can you speak to why these voices are so important? I think Amanda, you said it really well, this wasn't women just talking to women about women's health. Why is it so important to have women leadership in such a crucial industry like healthcare? We could talk about every industry, but we'll talk about healthcare today. To making the industry better for everybody, not just women making better for women, but women being in the room, making healthcare better for every patient.
Amanda Zablocki:
Actually, Sara, I think you hit the nail on the head, right? Because you've talked about that intellectual capital. Right, you've got people who are not at the table that have a lot to bring, a lot of value to add. So if you're not including those people at the table, then you do see a missed opportunity, frankly, because you could have had a lot more diverse viewpoints and perspectives, which all the studies show really supports business growth.
But at the end of the day, there's a true cost to not having women in leadership positions because leaders, by definition, make decisions that impact what a business does, where it invests, what it's going to do with its different lines of business. And when you don't have women at the top of, let's take a hospital system for example, when you don't have women in leadership positions who don't understand what issues are facing women from a healthcare a vantage point, from really, a personal perspective, is that hospital system going to be able to effectively care for and treat its female patients?
And if it doesn't, and now let's harken back to that value-based care concept, if it doesn't and its missing opportunities to better care for its patients, it's going to see its cost drive up. It's going to see patients coming to the hospital for reasons that could have been prevented. We hear stories all the time about women presenting in ERs with incredible pain. And why is it that those women get turned away when they really have conditions? Why is it that women, their evaluation of pain isn't treated as seriously? Asking those questions is important, and oftentimes, it's simply a lack of women in the right positions to help make sure that the hospital's making those decisions fully informed about women's health.
At the end of the day, that affects the bottom line of any hospital, so it's a business case. Right. There's a clear business case to make sure there are women in leadership positions.
Sara Shanti:
Yeah, and I think that's right. This business case, which really drives a lot of innovation and evolution of any industry, you want to make the business case for it. But Danielle, as a litigator, I think there's also maybe a way to look at this of reducing risk for some of these massive organizations that carry a lot of risk just by the very nature of what they do. So if we have 75% of entry-level positions are women, those are the folks that are on the floor, seeing the everyday ER encounters, seeing what happens when there's kind of everything from cleanliness to ADA issues to patient discharge issues. So can you maybe just speak a second, not only to the business side, but kind of how promoting people who have been on the floor and kind of in the weeds of the industry can ultimately mitigate some of the other risks that you might see as a litigator?
Danielle Vrabie:
The other thing that we think about is how do we present to our opponents? How do we present to the DOJ? How do we present to a jury that might hear your case? All of these things matter. How do women witnesses
present versus male witnesses? Is that going to change the way that you're presenting your organization? All of these things are going to factor into that. But at bottom, you're right, Sara, is that we do want to embrace those individuals that are on the floor day to day and really have a deep understanding of the organizations that they work in.
Sara Shanti:
And I know in the room, or on the agenda at least, for the WHLC Summit, it was, of course, focused on value-based care, which I think we need every great mind in the room to help us figure out how to best carry out value-based care in a really efficient, meaningful way. But some other topics were antitrust, technology in healthcare, all things that you have to navigate to ensure you're providing care and you're meeting the value-based care and other governmental agency conditions of participation and compliance. I think we kind of touched on earlier when we are talking about women don't just represent women, bringing in those other ideas into healthcare, how important is it that we have women representation in those other industries that kind of feed into health and wellness?
Amanda Zablocki:
Women are consumers of healthcare. And just by virtue of the fact that we represent approximately 50% of the population and are known to be purchasers of healthcare sometimes on behalf of our families, sometimes-
Danielle Vrabie:
I was going to add to that, Amanda, not just consumers of healthcare, but they're often making healthcare decisions for the family.
Amanda Zablocki:
Yes. Which means that if you are not taking into account the women's perspective, you've missed most of your customers, right? So I think it's very important not just in the hospital space or not just in the health plan space, but across the sectors that intersect with the healthcare industry.
We talked a lot at the summit about AI and about healthcare technology advancing healthcare. Value-based care relies on several principles. One of them is social determinants of health and supporting people where they are in their community. If you don't have a true understanding of a large segment of your population, you can't control population health effectively. That's a big blind spot. So having women in leadership positions across industries is critical to make sure that healthcare is truly advancing and effective for all.
Sara Shanti:
We're winding down the calendar year. We have a new administration coming in into the new year. So in 2025, especially under a new administration, which I know we all expected there to be changes one way or another, but how do you anticipate WHLC impacting and supporting healthcare as we all watch a new year, a new administration, and healthcare continue to move?
Amanda Zablocki:
So I think we'll continue to do what we've always done, which is provide resources to keep our members on the cutting edge of what's going on. There's a lot of shakeup coming down the pike, and women leaders as much as any other leader in healthcare need to know about it. Whether it's in the women's health space, obviously we know that's going to be a potential significant pain point for the healthcare industry over the next four years, whether it's in response to changes in vaccine strategy or changes in Medicare Advantage reimbursement or reductions in Medicaid funding, all of these different areas of healthcare are going to be impacted by a change in administration. Just like they always are, every change in administration, as you said earlier on, Sara. And we're going to be right there, holding their hands and helping the women leaders of WHLC grapple with these changes, identify what's coming next, and think creatively about solutions to those problems.
Sara Shanti:
Well, thank you so much for your time, Danielle Vrabi, Amanda Zablocki. What you guys are doing has been incredible and really excited to see everything that WHLC does next year. Look for our show notes below, and we will see you next time, unless you need Sheppard Mullin in the meantime. Thank you so much.
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