Since 2016, Matt Fisher has combined his two areas of expertise—healthcare and law—to host the Healthcare de Jure podcast. In the bimonthly podcast, Matt talks to various guests about emerging healthcare trends from a legal point of view. He also serves as general counsel for Carium, a telehealth platform company. Before joining Carium, Matt practiced law for more than a dozen years and advised clients across the healthcare spectrum on a wide range of legal matters.
Additionally, Matt is active with the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and the American Bar Association (ABA). He recently spoke to Davida Dinerman on the Look Left @ Marketing podcast. Conversion highlights include:
- Following guidelines from OpenNotes, an international movement promoting and studying transparent communication in healthcare, will lead to greater patient outcomes: “There have been a few articles I’ve seen the past couple of months emphasizing that when the OpenNotes program is followed—which is when you give (patients) free and open access to medical records and the notes contained—patients can help identify things because everyone makes mistakes in what’s being documented. And seeing that information can help change a patient’s perspective on things because seeing a message starkly written drives a message home in a different way than having a discussion.”
- Contrary to what some believe, Matt doesn’t see HIPAA and the 21st Century Cures Act as contradictory regulations: “HIPAA really allows for information to go to a lot of different places. It really enables information to be used to support commonsense business operations within healthcare. If there’s any concern about conflict, it would be between federal regulations—HIPAA and the 21st Century Cures Act—and the state laws because the federal laws set the outer boundaries and the states can contract within that. State laws can’t contradict what federal laws are saying, but they can impose more stringent requirements, which is often the case.”
- The pandemic accelerated the use of remote technology in healthcare: “All of the sudden with Covid, everything shut down and within weeks you had this tremendous shift to deliver care remotely and using all these digital tools, and it was done effectively. That’s not an argument to say that everything should shift virtually. You have to find the right continuum because certain things have to occur in person, but hopefully, we’re closer to just calling it all healthcare. We’re going to figure out the right modality of delivering healthcare in the right instance.”
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