I’m spending Fall 2019 as a Legal Intern with Privia Health, an Arlington-based public health organization working to make healthcare delivery what it ought to be. Posted below is a midterm self evaluation:

 

I have been learning a lot with my position in the legal department at Privia Health, an Arlington-based organization focused on improving public health outcomes through the use of population health technology and helping independent physicians remain autonomous within their practices. It’s a nongovernmental organization, but it works closely with governmental stakeholders and familiarizes itself with updates in health policy, healthcare access, insurance policies, and preventative practice guidelines. 

My job specifically has more to do with the policy process, but the company as a whole is more concerned with the policy outcomes. Privia’s slogan is “changing healthcare to what it ought to be,” because they’re most concerned with how to deliver better healthcare to more people. An emphasis on access to preventative care will greatly relieve the pressure on our current healthcare system as more and more disease is prevented, so Privia is invested in better health outcomes for all. The legal department handles a lot more than I originally thought. In addition to contracts with our care centers, we are constantly seeking out updates in coding practices, state level requirements for accredited healthcare centers, and physician member service agreements. I have been primarily working on consolidating contracts for our clients over a number of platforms–Salesforce, Excel, Docusign, Google Drive, etc.–and uploading them into a contracts database called Concord, where I tag them for organization.  

My immediate supervisor on paper is Kristen Hall, who is one of the Associate General Counsels for Privia. She seems to be second in command while Thomas Bartum, the General Counsel, is working remotely (which is a large majority of the time). In reality, I’m assigned projects and emailed assignments from everyone in the legal department. Since I’ve been here, they have also hired another legal intern who is in her second year of law school, as well as a legal assistant. I have done various projects from comparing documents to execute changes to templates for the legal team to use, to merging signed contracts with updated literature that became required after the signatory date. 

In addition to the responsibilities within my role, Privia has demonstrated a clear priority in my professional development. There was an extensive orientation where I learned not only about the role Privia plays in healthcare, but also how the technology we are developing leads to better population health outcomes. Through this, I was also exposed to compliance policy, various insurance complications, and more information about the ways Privia works to stay updated in the ever changing, complex field. They offer brown bag sessions weekly during lunch, that offer a variety of opportunities to develop important career skills. They promote a spectrum of continuous knowledge, and the people who have been here the longest are usually the first to admit that they don’t know everything about their respective fields. 

All in all, I’m getting a ton of experience reading legal jargon, creating different clauses with different functions within contracts, working on professional development, and gaining exposure to healthcare through the lense of the law.