Class of 2008-09 Clinical Teaching Fellow Harrison Institute for Public Law Georgetown University Law Center 600 New Jersey Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20001 (202) 662-9000

Profile:

Sandy received her J.D. from the University of Richmond Law School, where she interned at the Fourteenth Judicial Circuit Court of Virginia and the Commonwealth Attorney’s office in the Juvenile and Domestic Courts prosecuting domestic violence cases.  Upon graduation she served as a Law Clerk for the Twelfth Judicial Circuit Court of Virginia and worked as an Associate at Harmon, Claytor, Corrigan and Wellman, a civil defense firm.  Sandy began her work in health care compliance as a Policy Compliance Analyst at the United Network for Organ Sharing, a non-profit organization administering the transplantation system in the United States.  Subsequently,  Sandy worked in the health care regulation and compliance field as the Compliance Director at the Washington Hospital Center and as Associate Vice President for Strategic Management (SM), a private consulting group.  While at SM she also served as the company’s first Compliance Director.  Sandy recently received her Master of Laws (L.L.M.) degree with honors in Global Health Law from Georgetown University Law Center.  She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Korean American Scholarship Foundation.

As the Health Policy Fellow at the Harrison Institute, Sandy is responsible for working on client projects by supervising clinic students for project completion or completing the work herself.  One of the main projects she worked on is the “O’Neill Top Ten” in partnership with the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center.  This initiative involves analyzing health care proposals for legal barriers or issues in a bipartisan manner.  Various experts, mostly from academia, have analyzed legal issues to be addressed in various health care reform proposals.  These experts have each drafted individual papers on their respective issues to be combined into one written product in order to help inform the new administration about these issues.  Sandy was responsible for coordinating many of the health care reform issues.  She headed the segments addressing Definition of Health Insurance, Individual Mandates, ERISA, Insurance Discrimination, and Insurance Discrimination Based on Health Status, and she directly supervised three students with secondary supervision of a fourth student.  Sandy also responded to research requests on ERISA and Insurance Discrimination Based on Health Status.  She learned about the two amendments to ERISA specifically concerning women’s health issues, the Maternity Length of Stay in 1996 and the Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act in 1998, as well as the HIPAA amendments prohibiting discrimination based on pre-existing conditions including any related to pregnancy.   Moreover, Sandy and her colleagues launched the Legal Solutions in Health Reform project, which included editing and making available many scholarly papers on various aspects of health reform.  Another of Sandy’s main projects was to conduct outreach to create a women’s issue-oriented project for the clinic in the spring.  She collaborated with Brook Kelly at The Women’s Collective to develop a project with the clinic for the spring semester, examining the health provider refusal clause regulations that came out in December before the Bush Administration left office.  They initially analyzed the potential impact on HIV positive or HIV high risk women in D.C. by looking at state equivalents and also stigma or discrimination effects on care with HIV women.  Once the regulation was reversed by the Obama Administration, the student was also able to research and write about access to care for women with or at risk of HIV in Washington, D.C.  Sandy noted that through supervising the project, she had the opportunity to learn a lot about women at risk or living with HIV/AIDS in D.C., and how disconnected the services seem to be for this population, as well as the fact that the United States does not have a national policy on HIV/AIDS.

Sandy was admitted to the Virginia bar in 2000 and the District of Columbia bar in 2008.