Emily Jane Cook

LOS ANGELES - Emily Jane Cook co-chairs McDermott's health regulatory and compliance practice area, overseeing more than two dozen attorneys working in that specialized niche of the firm's top-rated health care practice.
It's an atypical practice in an area that the public knows little about. "We're behind the scenes," Cook said. "The clients don't really want anyone to know that we were involved in solving their significant problems because they don't want anyone to know there were problems to begin with."
Often, she advises health care clients about the requirements to receive payments for providing services to beneficiaries of federal and state health care programs. And she represents the clients if they're concerned about or accused of noncompliance in a qui tam or False Claims Act investigation or litigation.
For instance, in February, she and her team won dismissal of a federal qui tam action accusing a national health care system of overcharging Medicare for the costs of acquiring organs for transplant.
They suspected the main reason the case was filed was that the idea of selling organs sounded salacious to the plaintiff's attorney. "However, it ultimately was an issue of extremely mundane financial accounting and Medicare cost reporting principles," she said.
Some trickier matters Cook has handled recently dealt with Medicare rules that pay more for medical services provided in a hospital or hospital clinic than for the same services in a doctor's office or separate clinic.
"The federal government has been very focused on that differential in the past several years," she said. The rules about whether a clinic is or is not part of a hospital are "extremely granular, complex & not well-articulated."
In one matter, she managed to convince U.S. attorneys in Colorado that her client had indeed followed a particular technical rule about providing notifications to patients. In another, she advocated behind the scenes for a year to obtain guidance that a California cancer center's proposed off-campus clinic would count as part of the hospital.
Cook has been involved with health care regulation and policy her entire working life and even before, she said. During college, she interned with a health policy institute. She earned a master's degree in public health, and she then went to work for the federal Health Resources and Services Administration before moving into law.