Keynote Speaker
Richard C. Boothman
Chief Risk Officer, Univ. of Mich. Health System
In July, 2001, trial attorney Rick Boothman left a busy malpractice defense practice in Michigan and Ohio to join the University of Michigan Health System, intent on establishing a new approach to medical malpractice. Reasoning that by prioritizing patient safety over traditional claims management practices patient injuries and claims would drop, communication would improve, and the interests of all involved in the intimate business of delivering health care would be better served, he worked to develop an approach that would come to be known as the Michigan Model.
Improving patient safety relies unquestionably on honesty. Contrary to conventional beliefs however, Rick reasoned that the same honesty would have a favorable claims impact, relegating litigation to its intended role: as a last resort to resolving claims that could not be resolved amicably. He led the re-design of their process based on three simple, but incontestable principles: to compensate patients quickly and fairly when unreasonable care injured them, to support caregivers vigorously when their care was reasonable, and most importantly, to learn and improve through patients’ experiences. Rick and others at UMHS are now actively leveraging the benefits derived from the transparency to other issues including bold innovations in peer review and creative corporate reorganization designed to more effectively capture and respond to patient safety challenges.
The U of M’s open and honest approach to patient injuries and its impact on patient safety and claims has garnered national and international attention. It has been featured on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, All Things Considered, and Marketplace, the New England Journal of Medicine, CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, BBC radio and the Korean Broadcasting System among many others. In 2005, Rick advised then Senators Clinton and Obama in the formulation of legislation called the MEDiC Act. At the invitation of Chairman, Senator Michael Enzi (R-WY) he testified before the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in 2006. He is currently advising a task force organized by Oregon’s governor to address the dual problems of patient injury and malpractice. Rick consults on several research initiatives funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Patient Safety and Medical Liability Reform program. He sits on the Board of Governors for the National Patient Safety Foundation and the Board of Directors for the Michigan Hospital Association’s Patient Safety Organization. He has consulted for many academic and non-academic health care systems and hospitals.
Rick has delivered scores of presentations for groups and audiences around the country. In 2008, he was recognized by Midwest In-House Counsel magazine and Michigan Lawyer’s Weekly with their Leader in the Law Award and he received the Paul R. Venzke Award for Excellence in Risk Management from the Michigan Society of Health Care Risk Managers. Rick and others have published their experience and results in the American Health Lawyer’s Journal of Health and Life Sciences Law, the Annals of Internal Medicine, Frontiers of Health Services Management, a journal of the American College of Healthcare Executives and the Milbank Quarterly.
Rick serves as the Executive Director of Clinical Safety at the University of Michigan Health System. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of Detroit School of Law. Rick lives with his wife, Karen and family in Ann Arbor.
Featured Speaker
Dr. Saby Ghoshray, MBA, PhD
President, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies
Director, WorldCompliance Company
With over a decade of corporate experience with premier investment banks and fortune 50 corporations, Dr. Saby Ghoshray founded the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies to foster and disseminate advanced legal scholarship premised on multidisciplinary approach. Besides serving in various executive positions from Global Mergers & Acquisitions to Corporate Compliance, he has been a prolific researcher in multi-faceted disciplines, investigating issues from cross-cultural perspectives. He is the author of numerous law review articles and book chapters including the significant scholarship in death penalty jurisprudence,
Tracing the Contours of the Evolving Standards of Decency: Examining Supreme Court's Capital Jurisprudence Post-Roper, 2 J. Cath. Legal Stud. 561 (2006), and the widely cited article on prison jurisprudence,
America the Prison Nation: Melding Humanistic Jurisprudence with a Value-Centric Incarceration Model, 34 New Eng. L. Rev. 313 (2008). Dr. Ghoshray’s main scholarship searches for equality in the legal process vis-à-vis the prism of gender, class and ethnicity, which is echoed in his work on diverse subsets of
International Law,
Comparative Constitutionalism,
Law & Policy, and
Law & Religion, among others.
His work has been published in various prestigious journals, such as the Albany Law Review, ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law, Fordham International Law, Santa Clara Law Review, European Law Journal ERA-Forum, Toledo Law Review, Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, Catholic Legal Studies, Santa Clara Law Review, Loyola Law Journal, Michigan State International Law Journal, Georgetown International Law Review, and Miami Law Review, among others. He studied law at Cornell University where he received an MBA from the prestigious Johnson Graduate School of Management. He completed his PhD in Chaos Theory at Florida International University. Dr. Ghoshray is multi-lingual, has travelled extensively while lecturing as both Panel Chair and Moderator in numerous legal symposiums in wide-ranging topics of Law, Policy & Corporate Governance.
Sujatha Baliga
Director, Restorative Justice Project, and Senior Program Specialist
National Council on Crime and Delinquency
Sujatha Baliga’s work is characterized by an equal dedication to victims and persons accused of crime. A former victim’s advocate and public defender, Sujatha was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship in 2008, which she used to spearhead a successful restorative juvenile diversion program in Alameda County, CA. As the former director of Community Justice Works, she expanded and institutionalized the program she began through her Soros Fellowship. Sujatha has served as a consultant to the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, has taught restorative justice to undergraduates and law students, and is a frequent guest lecturer at academic institutions and conferences.
Today, as director of the restorative justice project at NCCD, Sujatha assists communities in implementing restorative justice alternatives to juvenile detention and zero-tolerance school discipline policies. She also provides technical assistance to the US Attorney General’s Task Force on Childhood Exposure to Violence.
Sujatha earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and her JD from the University of Pennsylvania. She has held federal clerkships with the Honorable William K. Sessions, III, former chair of the US Sentencing Commission and with the Honorable Martha Vázquez. A national voice in restorative justice, she was honored as Northeastern University Law School’s Daynard Fellow, featured in the New York Times Magazine, and has been a guest on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.
Howard Zehr
Distinguished Professor of Restorative Justice
Co-Director, Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice
Center for Justice & Peacebuilding – Eastern Mennonite University
Widely known as “the grandfather of restorative justice,” Zehr began as a practitioner and theorist in restorative justice in the late 1970s at the foundational stage of the field. Zehr continues in this third decade to deepen the principles of restorative justice and grow its practice worldwide. He has led hundreds of events in more than 25 countries and 35 states, including trainings and consultations on restorative justice, victim-offender conferencing, judicial reform, and other criminal justice matters. His impact has been especially significant in the United States, Brazil, Japan, Jamaica, Northern Ireland, Britain, the Ukraine, and New Zealand, a country that has restructured its juvenile justice system into a family-focused, restorative approach.
A prolific writer and editor, speaker, educator, and photojournalist, Zehr actively mentors other leaders in the field. More than 1,000 people have taken Zehr-taught courses and intensive workshops in restorative justice, many of whom lead their own restorative justice-focused organizations, such as the Council for Restorative Justice at Georgia State University, the Youth Justice Initiative in Iowa, and Mediation Northern Ireland (a major contributor to peace in Northern Ireland).
Zehr was an early advocate of making the needs of victims central to the practice of restorative justice. A core theme in his work is respect for the dignity of all peoples.
From 2008-2011 he served on the Victims Advisory Group of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. He serves on various other advisory boards.
Andy & Kate Grosmaire
Parents of Ann Grosmaire
McBride Family
(Left to right: Katy, Conor, Julie, Michael)
Parents of Conor McBride
Dr. Jessica Scott, MD, JD
Director, North America Medical Advocacy and Policy
GlaxoSmithKline
Jessica received her B.S degree in Biology and Psychology from Union College in Schenectady, NY. She then attended Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts receiving her M.D., then completing her Residency in Family Medicine at the University of Virginia. Jessica practiced as a Family Physician in North Carolina for eleven years, and then, interested in improving healthcare quality and reducing the stress of litigation on physicians, she felt compelled to obtain her law degree. She entered Campbell University School of Law and received her J.D., graduating with honors in 2010. In addition to serving as an expert witness, Jessica has advocated in the medical malpractice arena for both plaintiffs and defendants. As a result, she has become even more committed to helping both sides through improved health care quality along with reduced fear of litigation and defensive medicine. Since her admission to the bar, Jessica has continued her work to improve health care quality, advising physician and hospital leaders across the country on improving culture and outcomes, reviewing HR Policies, Root Cause Analyses, occurrence reports, and employee surveys. Jessica has worked with hospital systems as well as state hospital associations to improve patient safety and quality in healthcare. Jessica participated in the North Carolina Medical Society’s Physician Leadership College. She currently sits on the Clinical Quality and Health Care Financing Committee and is also a member of the Accountable Care Task Force within the NC Medical Society. Her experience and perspective led her to create the IACT Program, a new model for the peaceful resolution of conflicts between hospitals and physicians, patients and providers.
Diann Seigle
Executive Director Carolina Dispute Settlement Services
Diann Seigle is the Executive Director for Carolina Dispute Settlement Services and has served in that capacity since 1997. Diann’s areas of practice include dispute resolution system design, mediation in complex cases, arbitration, med-arb, and teaching. Honored as one of only eight mediators in North Carolina to achieve “Advanced Practitioner” member status from the National Association of Conflict Resolution, she has mediated over four thousand cases in the Medicaid, family, employment, and criminal areas. Diann designed and implemented many of North Carolina’s current alternative dispute resolution systems, including the NC Office of Administrative Hearings Medicaid Appeal program, NC Office of State Personnel Employee Grievance Mediation program, the UNC Hospital Employee Grievance Mediation and Panel Hearing Program. Diann has presented at numerous American Bar Association ADR Section conferences including Seattle, New York and Los Angeles on a variety of topics. She has served as a member of the NC Bar Association ADR Council, the Wake County Domestic Violence Task Force, a board member of the Mediation Network of North Carolina and was a two term Commissioner for the North Carolina Dispute Resolution Commission, co-chairing the Committee on Standards and Discipline.
Jeff Seigle, JD
Co-Founder, Separating Together Collaborative Law Practice
Jeffrey M. Seigle is an advanced mediator, arbitrator, and attorney. Mr. Seigle received his B.A. degree from the University of Michigan and his J.D. degree from Campbell University School of Law. His law practice has included family law, juvenile law, bankruptcy law, and real estate law. Jeff helped successfully litigate the class action lawsuit brought against the state of North Carolina because of overcrowding in the juvenile detention facilities, thereby improving conditions and requiring delivery of psychological services to incarcerated youth. Mr. Seigle was thereafter appointed to the Governor’s Juvenile Crime Commission. In 2001, having concluded that litigation did not serve families well, Jeff co-founded the first family collaborative practice group in Wake County and one of the first in North Carolina. He appreciated the fact that in the collaborative setting his clients could control their outcome, unlike in the adversarial process, and walk away with a more satisfactory resolution. Jeff is an instructor for the Alternative Divorce Resolution (ADR) clinic at NC Central Law School, and teaches mediation and arbitration for the UNC Health Care System and the NC Office of State Personnel. On a weekly basis, Mr. Seigle donates his time and skills to support the Carolina Dispute Settlement Services organization. Mr. Seigle has mediated and arbitrated numerous cases in the areas of family, criminal, contract and commercial law.
Aida Doss Havel, JD
Separating Together Collaborative Law Practice
Aida Doss Havel is an attorney who spent over twenty-five years litigating issues related to their children, their money, and their property. Three years ago, after seeing the destruction that courtrooms and fighting brought to her clients and their children, she wound up her remaining litigation caseload and said goodbye to the adversarial process. Aida now limits her practice to mediation and collaborative law, and is pleased to call herself a “recovering litigator” and a peacemaker. She is a graduate of Davidson College and UNC Law School, and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Conflict and Peace Studies at UNC-G.
Aida currently serves as the Chair of the Wake County Board of Elections. She is also on the boards of the Unity Church of the Triangle, NC-GALA (Gay and Lesbian Attorneys), and the Outer Banks History Center. And she is on the Leadership Committee of the IACT Program, where she has trained two groups of attorneys, coaches, and mediators in bringing collaborative law principles to the health care field.
Barbara Phillips-Bute, PhD
Assistant Professor, Duke University School of Medicine
Barbara Phillips-Bute holds a PhD in Psychology from Duke University, and will graduate this May from the evening program at North Carolina Central University Law School with the advanced Certificate in Dispute Resolution. Barbara is a research faculty member at Duke Medical Center, where she studies the causes and prevention of adverse medical outcomes in surgical patients. She has coauthored over 100 peer reviewed journal articles and more than 300 research abstracts on medical outcomes, and has presented research findings on post-cardiac surgery outcomes at national and international conferences. She is a DRC Certified Mediator (Superior Court, Clerk of Court, Estates & Guardianship) and is trained in the IACT Collaborative Law model for healthcare transparency and disclosure.
Scarlette Gardner, MBA, JD
Attorney, NC Secretary of State Charitable Solicitation Licensing Division
Scarlette Gardner is a licensed attorney and graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law and holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Business Administration from East Carolina University. Ms. Gardner is also a certified Superior Court mediator and has completed IACT collaborative law training at Carolina Dispute Settlement Services. She is currently employed as the attorney for the NC Secretary of State Charitable Solicitation Licensing Division. Her prior professional experience includes serving on the staff of NC State Senate President Pro Tempore Marc Basnight, legal counsel to the Chairman of the NC Industrial Commission, associate general counsel at the NC Medical Society, and DHHS hearing officer. Scarlette has conducted continuing education programs for physicians, attorneys, allied health professionals, and insurance carriers and has extensive expertise on topics including administrative law and rulemaking, health law and healthcare delivery systems, Medicaid clinical policy and claims payment, mental health, public health, and workers compensation.
