Amilestone
for Loyola
health law
W
hen former School
of Law dean Nina
Appel opened the
doors to what
later became known as the Beazley
Institute for Health Law and Policy in
1984, she envisioned the health law
program as a place where doctors
and lawyers could come to better
understand their shared interests.
“She recognized the inherent
tension between doctors and
lawyers,” says Larry Singer, the
Beazley Institute’s director. “Their only
opportunities to meet were in the
courtroom under bad circumstances.
Nina wanted to change that.”
At the start, there were only 20
students. Resources were limited; the
program had a single professor, John
Blum, the John J. Waldron Research
Professor, who was assisted by a lone
administrative assistant.
But 30 years later, nearly
everything has changed—both in
the field of health law and at the
Beazley Institute.
A rapidly
shifting industry
The industry is markedly
different than it was not that
long ago, says Ryan Meade, the
program’s Regulatory Compliance
Studies director.
When Meade graduated from law
school in 1992, a health lawyer was
a health lawyer. “You had to do a lot
of different things,” he says. “To some
extent, being a health lawyer simply
meant that you applied a broad
spectrum of law to a specific industry.
While health care is complex, with its
own rules and laws, it really was just
Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the Beazley
Institute for Health Law and Policy still
pioneers in this ever-evolving field
MOMENTUM
John Blum (right) congratulates Larry Singer on his 14 years of success serving as
director of Loyola’s nationally ranked Beazley Institute for Health Law and Policy.
NEW CURRICULUM
an industry-specific contextualization
of the law. But now health care has
become so regulated in so many
different areas that health lawyers
have become hyperspecialized.”
As an ever-changing array of
regulations has led to increasing
specialization in the field, the once
humble program has developed
offerings to suit attorneys and health
care workers’ needs.
It now offers four different
campus-based degree programs: a JD
certification for Loyola law students
who want to specialize in health law;
a Master of Laws (LLM) for attorneys
looking to develop a special expertise
in health law; a Doctor of Laws for
health care professionals who have
graduated from Loyola’s Master of
Jurisprudence (MJ) in Health Law
program; and a Doctor of Juridical
Studies for attorneys who have an
LLM or equivalent who want to
continue their research.
Online, the institute offers an
MJ for health care professionals who
want to better understand the laws,
regulations, and policies governing
health care and an LLM, as well
as non-degree programs for both
lawyers and health care professionals.
Those academic offerings,
along with the Institute’s Health
Justice Project—a medical-legal
partnership clinic that allows students
to engage in interprofessional
collaboration to identify and address
social and legal issues that negatively
affect the health of low-income
individuals—have led
Law Street
to
rank Loyola as the top program in the
country and
US News & World Report
to rate it third.
Out in front
The Beazley Institute hasn’t
just kept up with the changing
industry; in many ways it has led the
way. For instance, while compliance
has emerged as an area ripe for
scholarship, the School of Law has
built up one of the largest compliance
programs in the country. It is one of
only a few institutions that enable
students to earn master’s-level degrees
in health law and business law with a
concentration in compliance studies.
That’s particularly important
as health law gets increasingly
complicated (see story at right).
Medicare, for instance, has more than
200,000 pages of rules associated
with the program.
“It’s natural that there will be
some ambiguity given that these rules
have been written by many people
over a long period of time,”Meade
says. “So we must start exploring more
deeply how to reconcile ambiguities,
especially given that we don’t have
many court cases to guide us.”
The Beazley Institute has
also sought to develop academic
dialogues. Eight years ago it launched
an annual symposium on access to
health care. This year, the symposium
will commemorate the program’s 30th
anniversary by exploring legal and
policy issues in the health insurance
arena and examining past, current,
and future trends.
The program’s digital push—
it began offering online courses
seven years ago—has exposed
far more people to health law
principles who otherwise might
not have access to those types of
courses, Singer says.
Students have signed up in
droves. There are currently 271
students taking Beazley online
courses, and the program is
continually focused on finding the
best ways to help students learn.
The newest Beazley member is an
instructional designer who is helping
faculty make their course lectures
more pointed and developing ways
to integrate lectures, PowerPoint
presentations, and exercises so that
the online courses aren’t passive.
“We want our students to be
actively involved,” Singer says.
With more students enrolling in
online courses, the Beazley Institute
has sought to meet their unique
needs by adding specialized staff,
including a full-time legal writing
director and career counselor.
As the health care industry
has evolved over the past 30 years,
the Beazley Institute has evolved
in tune. And with a barrage of
changes coming all the time, the
program will no doubt continue to
remain dynamic.
■
W
ith a constantly changing regulatory environment,
it’s become increasingly difficult to figure out a
systematic way to comply with the laws a person or
organization must follow.
That’s why the Beazley Institute for Health Law and Policy
offers students an opportunity to focus their health law studies
in compliance, an area the
Wall Street Journal
recently identified
as “the hottest job in America.”The School of Law is paving
the way as one of the few institutions in the country to allow
students to earn master’s-level degrees in health law and
business law with a concentration in compliance studies.
“The health care industry has been doing it on the fly for
too long,” says Ryan Meade, the Beazley Institute’s Regulatory
Compliance Studies director. “With so many rules and
regulations, it has become incredibly difficult for corporations,
corporate officers, and health care organizations to keep up. This
is the time for the ideas that have evolved to be incorporated
into academic programs with scholarship developed around
them. That’s the natural evolution for compliance.”
Keeping up
with compliance
“With so many rules
and regulations,
it has become
incredibly difficult
for corporations,
corporate officers,
and health care
organizations to
keep up.”
—R YAN ME AD E
FALL 2014
15
14
LOYOLA LAW
