The Center for Career Development and Success in partnership with The Pre-Health Society welcomed healthcare attorney Catherine Galea ’07 to share her experience within the healthcare industry as an attorney.
Since graduating from Dickinson in 2007, Galea has been practicing for 10 years and is currently working for the 10th largest firm in the country. She attended Drexel Law School, finishing with both a Juris Doctorate (JD) and a Master’s in Public Health (MPH) in 2016.
Speaking honestly with students, Galea commented that she “doesn’t know if her MPH helps her [to] be a better lawyer, but it does show to companies that [she is] actually interested in the healthcare side of law.”
In her presentation-style discussion with students, Galea gave an overview of the scale of the US healthcare industry. The US has a $4 trillion industry, composed of traditional healthcare providers and a plethora of different workers involved. Galea specifically works in health technology and privacy with medical software. She emphasized that there are “many places you can go within the healthcare system and be happy.”
The system can be divided into four groups: providers, payers (insurance), suppliers and vendors (health technology). She emphasized the increase in the vendor sector in recent years since the value of using health technology has shot up in recent years because of its usefulness in administering better care for patients.
Through her discussion of the role of the life sciences in the health field, Galea expressed the various routes students can take to immerse themselves in the industry. She brought up the Pre-Health pharmaceutical trek, which the Career Center held earlier this semester, as an example of this. During the trip, students connected with alumni that worked within this sector of healthcare, which includes pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology, medical technology, and more. Gale emphasized that the trip was not centered around “a bunch of chemists,” but rather the eight alumni in attendance who “did things very different from each other within the pharma space.”
A short Q&A followed the session, where Galea went into more detail on the specifics of the work she does.
From a law standpoint, she talked about the importance of notetaking, saying, “there’s an art to it. Everyone does it differently. But writing thoughtful, truthful notes is important because you’re not going to remember every patient. As a lawyer, what you [the doctor] wrote at the time is what [I’m] going to go by and what the person who’s suing is going up against,” she said.
Galea also talked about common HIPAA issues (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) that providers find themselves in that the average patient usually doesn’t know about.
“Where [I] see entry level providers get in trouble with HIPAA is curiosity. Looking at a patient’s record out of curiosity is a fireable offense,” she said. Giving the example of the Brittany Spears case–where medical professionals were led by their curiosity to go through her files–is a “bit extreme,” but is becoming more commonplace, unfortunately. “HIPAA requires that there’s audit trails and trackers on your movement within systems. You are only intended to access what you’re meant to access,” she said. She explained that it is better to ask questions than to end up in a situation you did not intend to.
