Executive Fellowship in Health Law

8-month fellowship to start periodically the beginning of March

The Executive Fellowship in Health Law is an eight-month distance learning, intensive program taught by practicing attorneys and law professors.  Faculty will be a combination of hospital attorneys, both retained and in-house, law school faculty, all with a special emphasis on practitioners with dual degrees in MHA, MD, JD, MS.  The program is designed especially for, medical clinicians, hospital administrators, nursing home executives, group practice managers, nurses, pharmacists, risk managers, physicians and other interested parties who work with retained or in-house legal counsel.  The program is designed to give intensive orientation to current health care legal issues, supplemented with case studies, so that hospital professionals can better manage their own legal expenses and supervise legal consultants in an effective and cost efficient manner.   

Fellows will have access to Virginia Commonwealth University’s Blackboard system and on-line libraries; VCU has a renowned Internet library for full text articles in law, medicine, and health care. The program will begin with a 3-day on-campus introduction session, in March, on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University or the University Of Richmond Law School.  This will be followed by on-line modules in healthcare regulatory law, medical staff issues, corporate law, insurance law, medical malpractice and patient safety, bioethics, Medicare fraud and abuse, and informed consent.

Fellows will receive executive education in legal research and reasoning and will brief legal cases, read and analyze federal and state statutory laws, research healthcare issues using Lexis-Nexis, and will graduate with the ability to clearly research, analyze and discuss current healthcare legal issues with colleagues, attorneys, and administrators. Fellows will be taught to research their own state law as well as federal laws.  In addition graduates will be able to more effectively manage retained legal counsel and better communicate complex legal issues with both attorneys and healthcare professionals.  Fellows will be required to write a 15-25 page research paper a specific health related legal issue unique to their organization.  Faculty and fellows will also take advantage of current legal issues in the news and current healthcare litigation to better understand how laws impact on the delivery and administration of health care in this country.

Next fellowship scheduled to begin in March of 2009

More information

Please contact us at kswisher@vcu.edu

News and updates

Cardwell Comments Summer 2007 pages 18-22

Cardwell Comments Winter 2006 - 2007 pages 17-19

Cardwell Comments Summer 2006 page 19