Crowell & Moring LLP announced that the launch of a new consulting vertical, Crowell Health Solutions, to work with health care organizations and technology companies on digital health innovations and other improvements to health care models.
The new consulting firm is led by three of the firm’s partners who all have a background in government and health care — Jodi G. Daniel, who founded the firm’s digital health practice and previously worked in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services as a director, Troy Barsky, who was the former director of the Division of Technical Payment Policy at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and Janet C. Walker, who just recently was a lead in-house counsel for health care system Ascension before joining the firm in July.
Daniel and Walker told Law360 Pulse that the firm noticed the trends in the health care industry, particularly in the wake of the pandemic,
and saw an opportunity to help clients in a new way.
“We see this as a way of getting more strategically engaged and partnering with our clients across that broader lifecycle of their product development and innovation, and to provide a larger suite of services and expertise to those clients,” Daniel said.
Throughout the pandemic, Daniel said the health care industry had seen a lot of relaxation of legal requirements related to innovative tools and technologies, like making reimbursement under Medicare for telehealth easier and relaxing HIPAA regulations for audio-video technology.
“There’s been a lot of positive experience with those technologies as well as investment in tools to support that new way of providing and delivering care,” Daniel said. “And so, what will happen at the end of the pandemic, will those rules go back to where they were before?” The goal of the consulting firm is to work with Crowell & Moring’s existing clients, finding new health care and technology clients and offering them strategic and compliance counseling, while also advocating for policy changes in the regulatory space.
The firm will also help clients build coalitions, which Walker said is just bringing together groups with common interests to enact legislative changes and other kinds of developments in the health care model across the United States.
“We’re uniquely positioned because we’re not only able to translate the technical regulations from a legal standpoint, that come out of government, but also drive specific policy changes that will really ensure that the regulatory environment keeps pace with patient-focused innovation such as value-based care,” Walker said.
The new Crowell & Morning vertical is meant to complement the firm’s existing health care technology practice, Walker said. The consulting firm is starting with a handful of health care lawyers at the firm who Walker and Daniel say will wear dual hats in both the law firm and the consulting firm.
They said the firm hopes to grow and attract talent with both a legal background and also a business and policy background.
“[The consulting firm] enables us to work with different parts of a healthcare organization, to work with some strategy people, the business folks, the product teams, policy teams,” Daniel said. “It enables us to bring on new talent with different skill sets that can help provide more comprehensive solutions to build on top of the foundation that we have with our healthcare legal practice.”
