DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - The Chief Legal Officer (ft. Rob Gerberry)

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

On this episode of DGTL Voices, Ed welcomes Rob Gerberry, the Chief Legal Officer of SUMA Health. They discuss Rob's personal journey, his transition from a potential medical career to law, and the multifaceted role of a chief legal officer in healthcare. Rob shares insights on the evolving legal landscape, the importance of collaboration between legal and IT departments, and offers advice for aspiring lawyers. He emphasizes the significance of community engagement, continuous learning, and self-care in maintaining a balanced life while navigating the challenges of the healthcare industry.

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast, where we chat digital transformation, challenges, and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marks. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. This is the first episode, and we're like up to 250 or something, where we've had a chief legal officer. So, Rob, we're so excited to have you. Welcome to Digital Voices. Great. Thanks, Ed. Appreciate the invite. Look forward to our conversation.

So Rob is a chief legal officer for Summa Health, which is located in the Akron-Canton area. We'll get into that a little bit more later. And I think we first met Rob really through Summa Health. We did. Yep. Recruitment. Yeah. I was being recruited for the board a few years ago. And you obviously headed up the governance for all that. And so that's when we got to know each other. And I was like, hey, not only Summa Health. Of course, I knew Summa Health already, but I was like, hey, this legal person, he's not too bad. This Rob character. No, I really have enjoyed the relationship that we had for you and give me a whole new insight into what it means to be a chief legal officer. And that's why we wanted to cover

this on digital voices. So that was really the first time we met. But Rob, everyone wants to know, especially from a legal person, what kind of music is on your playlist? So I would say people would be surprised by the variety. Everything from Springsteen and Billy Joel to country to the songs my 23-year-old and 21-year-old daughters have taught me to add to my playlist. So it's pretty robust. That's funny. You know, that reminds me when I left the board meeting a week ago, so we're recording this in September, I stopped by Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And, of course, because I have daughters in that age range, of course, I'm not going to say what I had to buy for them.

but you could probably predict what that might have been. It starts with Taylor's her first name. So I get it completely. What about life mantra? Is there some words that you live by? Sure. Something I tell those daughters all the time is, you know, don't sweat the small stuff. You know, there are things that we can control and things that we can't and try to keep that

always in perspective. You know, one of the things I've learned through my own life experience is just how great an in asset everyone's health is and keeping that at the forefront. on everything else, you know, after health, we can tackle. Yeah, I like that. Sometimes we don't care enough about, do the self-care and get to focus, something else, and then that doesn't burn out very well long term. So tell us a little bit about you.

Rob, tell us a little bit about, you know, where you grew up and just who you are. We already know that you have two daughters in their early 20s and type of music. But what else about you? Sure. So I grew up in the Youngstown, Ohio area. my dad was a doc. Unfortunately, you know, again, being shaped by life experiences, we lost my mom when I was nine. She passed away from cancer and left me and my brother and sister and my dad.

My grandma moved in to raise us, and unfortunately she passed away a year later from cancer. And so when I talk about health being that great asset, you know, it really is. My dad tried different housekeepers to raise us for about nine months. And then finally his sister, my aunt said, He's an absolute saint. Family needs to be raised by family, and I'm going to raise your three kids and my four. So her kids were in high school at the time. We were younger and grade school. She'd come get us off the school, drive 10 minutes to her house, get her family taken care of, be there for us when we were off the bus, get us dinner, and then do the same for her family.

And so, you know, that was a really formative experience for me early in my life. I would say from there, the next big formative experience is, you know, where I went to school. I went to Catholic schools my whole life with culminated and going to Notre Dame. And Notre Dame really had an impact on me. From the education I got, I got to see good football and Lake Meaguer we're currently seeing. We won a national title in my era. But the time there, just really combining a strong education with a moral and ethical background

really was a framework from a way I tried to approach a lot of decisions that faced me currently in my role. No, that's super. And yeah, I didn't know about your background. I'm sorry to hear about your mom and your. your grandma. But what an amazing story about family coming together. That's so cool. Were there other decisive moments that led you sort of to what you're doing today, like becoming, getting involved in legal? So obviously, you understood the value of health that you talked about, but then

you took this turn into legal. So my dad being in the medical field, you know, was saying, you've really got to be a physician. Let's go make an impact. I know how passionate you are about people's health. my last year at Notre Dame, I worked in the emergency room and thought, uh-oh, I've come this far, I've applied to medical school, taking the MCATs, but I don't think I like blood. And that's not a good thing. And being in the ophthalmology field said, you'll get over it. So just come and get a master's in biology, do a gap year, and then apply to medical school. Well, at that point, I made the pivot and said, no, I think actually the way I'm going to go down is the legal path. And a big part of that was during law school, I worked at University Hospitals of Cleveland and their legal department

and got really good experiential learning from Judge McModigal, Jim McModigal, Bill Powell, and others in that department that really fostered my interest in this field. I then went to work for the Ohio Hospital Association for a summer, got to see the health policy side in ways we could shape and form these laws to make a better experience for patients. And from there, I went off into my legal career. Wow, that's pretty cool. I didn't realize the U.H connection, and I wonder if our time overlap. a little bit. I think McMona goal was there. Jim was there when I first got there, but then eventually Janet Miller became the chief legal counsel. So, yeah, and they got really good advice from them. Don't go directly in-house. Go to a law firm

first and get training. So I worked for Kelsey Hall during Griswold and their corporate legal department for several years, you know, getting corporate transactional experience, which we're still using today. And from there, I went to the law firm of McDonald-Hopkins for about nine, months until Bill Powell had given me a call to join him here at Summel. And so was Associate General Counsel for about nine years before I pivoted in 2014 into this Chief Legal Officer role. Yeah, so tell us a little bit about the role of being a Chief Legal Officer. What does that entail? Sure, and for me, it's evolved a little bit over time. I always say I've got three pods of responsibility right now. One is the traditional Chief Legal Officer functions.

I oversee our legal team both on the provider's side as well as we own our health insurance company. I oversee our compliance team, our audit team, and then our team that handles our litigation, our risk management and insurance team. So managing both our internal and external counsel, making sure that we best serve all the clients within our organization. One of the great lessons that Tom Strauss, a former CEO here at Summa taught, was that if you aren't serving the patient in a health care system, you better be serving someone who is. So we as a legal department, you know, take that mantra to heart. Our legal team and our lawyers are on call 24-7,

assist in our care providers with any questions they have, as well as routine stuff, reviewing contracts, making sure that we move things along so their organization can best conduct business. From there, I've also been able to be lucky enough to work with our government relations, community relations, community benefit, and diversity equity inclusion teams,

making sure that we build strong local partnerships, state partnerships, federal partnerships, to best advance our organization. That's my second pod, and then our last pod is kind of a hodgepodge of responsibilities. I oversee our police force. We've got about 120 commission police officers. I oversee what's called our physician service team.

That team does all our compensation modeling and contracting for employed physicians, our independent physicians, teaching, research, faculty, hospital-based providers. And so that's a really interesting area. as that continues to evolve from a fee-for-service model to a fee-for-value model in our compensation planning. And then lastly, as our corporate secretary, what Ed alluded to earlier, I get to work with our boards, both at the parent board level, our committee level, as well as our joint venture and subsidiary boards.

And that's a really interesting role as well. Wow. I mean, that's a big plate, Rob. That's amazing. All the different things I was writing them down. Amazing. All the different roles of responsibilities that a chief legal officer has. And again, that's why we wanted you on the program, because I don't think most of our audience may understand the breadth and depth that we're going to get into a little bit here at a minute about interactions with tech specifically or the digital side. But before we get there, how has the role evolved? You've been in the role quite some time now. And just like with technology, technology is always evolving. You know, we could move to the cloud and now AI. So we always

have to learn new things. How does it work in the legal space? Does it move super fast, like all the new things that come out? I think the, biggest piece is, you know, learning all the new rules and just a variety of things that you face. It's not just corporate law. You know, it could be things ranging from labor law issues that are brought forward to you, immigration issues that are brought forward to you. Even things on the litigation side, you know, you have someone that, you know, a person, unfortunately, passes at our ER, and the next thing you know, you've got family members fighting over who's going to get the car, you know, being able to respond to the variety of

different things that come forward, each and every day, that's the evolving piece, as well as trying to figure out in this really challenged financial order of health care, how do we have the most streamlined and highly productive department that drives the greatest value back to our clinical operations? That is something that through my work and through the network that I have on the chief legal officer's side, we're all sharing notes trying to figure out how we achieve that goal. Yeah, that's nice that you all have an association and it's similar in the CIO role where everyone's super willing to help each other out because we're all trying to do the right thing for our patients in our communities. What would you tell aspiring lawyers about getting into health care? Because I know,

in addition to everything you've already mentioned, you also serve as adjunct faculty and you help, you know, aspiring lawyers. So what do you advise them to go into health care or, you know, what are your thoughts around that? Sure. I advise them to figure out what their passion is because we all know, you know, going to work every day can be easy when you're doing something you love. It could be hard when you're doing something that you don't love. So really finding where your passion is. And then as a lawyer, there's lots of lawyers and trying to figure out your niche of expertise and then building your brand around it.

You know, getting out in front, speaking at conferences, something at the beginning part of my career was definitely afraid to do. And then finally got comfortable with, you know, not being afraid to participate in podcasts, writing articles, doing all the things that helped to show that you really want to help evolve your field, I think really helps build a network. And then when you look at me sitting here in Ohio and the group that I've been able to built for my professional society. I think it really helps drive value back to my organization that I could pick up the phone

and call some on the West Coast, East Coast here in the Midwest and be able to bounce things off to help make Sima better. Love it. So before we get to the IT part, you brought up a couple things that made me think. One is that you're doing a lot of different things, plus your family, and Soapbox Derby. So tell us the Soapbox Derby part before I ask you the hard question. So we've got a wonderful CEO here at Summa, Cliff Devaney, and Cliff is very passionate about giving back to our community. So he's asked each of our different leaders, find community boards that you can serve on, at least two, to make sure that you're giving back to the community that we serve.

And so the soapbox derby has been an institution in our marketplace for a long time. And not only the racing aspect of it, but the STEM aspect of education is something that I latched onto and have been able to serve that organization now for a number of years. Yeah, that's pretty cool. You don't see, not everyone can make that claim. That's pretty cool. All right, so you are doing a lot of different things. How do you sort of have that integrated life? How do you, you know, stay sane with all the stuff that you do?

I think whatever you're doing, try to do it to your fullest, whether it's your weekend time when you're spending it with family or playing golf like I like to do, or whether you're, you know, teaching a class and being able to advance your own learning as well as your students or when you're serving the organization that you're employed by, you know, try to be in the moment. moment and not take, you know, work home with you, being able when you're with your family to be with your family. I have a spunky 21 year old that when she was 10 grabbed my phone when I was

texting when I was sitting there reading her a bedtime story and said, Dad, if you're going to be with me, be with me. And from that moment, you know, I learned if you're going to spend time with family, go all in. Love it. Yeah. So important. All right. Now, let's talk about the relationship between the chief legal officer and chief information officer. So share with us what your typical interactions might be with technology as a department or division or the CIO specifically. So I'm really proud of the partnership that I have with our chief information officer. You know, from the time that he came to our organization and even his predecessors, they've always wanted our partnership as corporate service departments to be very strong and have gone out of their way to

make sure that we build a strong foundation to support that. It ranges from the evolving world of cybersecurity and how do we make sure that we partner together, not only on the legal and privacy side, but with me having the insurance side, how do we partner with our cyber insurance carriers to make sure we're doing all the best practices to protect our organization? It could be the way that HIPAA privacy reports to me, but HIPAA security reports to IT, and how do we cross those fields together to make sure we're building the right collaboration in that field, it could be learning more about what needs to be in really good software contracts

or contracts that are going to help support our IT vendors to make sure that we're not, you know, slowing that flow down, but making sure people understand, you know, what are the clauses and things that are really important to make sure our IT function works well. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. What are one or two things that you might advise aspiring CIOs or, you know, tech leaders as they sort of become leaders and new to working with legal. What are some things that they should know that you love to share with them? I think it's great as you form that new relationship with the chief legal officer, you know, to sit down and walk through a sample contract.

Now, understand, you know, what is the legal team looking at when that is forwarded to their inbox? You know, whether it be indemnity, whether it be risk allocation between the two parties, whether it be forecasting in the future, if something goes wrong here, how do we get our data out? Being able to really think through all those things and really form that partnership of, here's where I'm going to give you the latitude as a CIO to make a call,

but here's where I've got to protect the organization is the legal function to make sure, nope, don't get smitten by this vendor if they're selling you on a price or on a technology. We've got to take a step back and think about some of those foundational things in a contract. I love that. It reminds me of someone, I'm sure you know, Seth Wolf, who took me under his wing.

I was this kid, you know, when I was CIA, I had no idea about contracts. And pretty much did exactly what you just shared, you know, came up to me, took a very gentle approach, but basically taught me, you know, the T's and C's. And it was really good. Or how to dot the eyes and, you know, those sort of things. It brought a lot of clarity for me and really took me to the next level where I needed to be. So it's good stuff. Yeah, so I encourage all of our listeners, develop strong relationships with your legal partners,

and I think it'll be great for the organization and everyone learns. So I want to talk a little bit about leadership. Was there anything early in your life? Well, you already shared a couple things that helped prepare you, though, for your current role. So anything that happened earlier, sort of shaped your direction. So I would say one of the things is having, had the privilege to serve as a captain of sports teams back in high school. I was captain of our golf and tennis teams and being able at a young age to figure out, all right, if you're going to

take on that role, how do you make sure to do right by the people that put you on that role and the people that elected you to that position? I think that was a unique experience that I reflect back on that when I face some of the unique challenges that we all face as leaders. Yeah, that's good. It's important. I mean, it's one of the great things about participating in sports and you get a lot of leadership, especially early in life. What can you share with aspiring leaders who want to be like you? So they see Rob, not necessarily that Rob the lawyer, but Rob in the community, Rob leading in a health care organization. What would you say to young people who are sort of, you know, looking up at you thinking, man, I'd kind of like to be in that sort of role in my future? I think it's always important to be a continuous learner. I find some people I talk to, they feel like it's a referendum on them if someone says, hey, everybody thought about doing this

differently, or have you ever thought about reading this book on leadership or participating in this activity to grow your leadership skills? I don't think it's a referendum that anything you're doing currently is for. I think it's an opportunity to continue to expand your toolbox and to be able to bring new things to the table. We don't live in a static world. We live in a very dynamic world. So I think we've got to continue to evolve our skill set along the way. And that's one recommendation I'd give to others. We touched on this a little bit earlier, but it's an important point I want to sort of talk about a little bit more. And that's how do you recharge your batteries and remain fresh? So you told us about how you handle the integration, you know, about being present

and doing what you really want to do, be in the moment. But certainly you need some downtime. Talks about golf. Maybe that's it. But anything else that you do that just kind of helps you with mindfulness and getting through the challenges that we're all faced with every day. Yeah, I'd say it's probably a variety of tools. As I've aged and thought more about longevity,

I really started to focus more on exercise and doing a variety of different kind of things. ranging from the Peloton bike to the tread, but also to yoga and other things. I also find the mindless bin watching Netflix every once in a while to be extremely helpful as well that just for one hour to be able to shut it down and focus on something different

really also serves as a good form of self-care. Yeah. So when you mentioned Netflix, now it doesn't have to be a Netflix-related show, but are there any shows? So I want to ask two parts of this question. It's going to be about shows about legal. Like, are there any shows that have been on in the past or currently that you think represent sort of the legal profession pretty well and certain ones that maybe were more drama than reality?

I would say suits is more drama than reality. I would say for those litigators out there, a show or a movie like presumed innocent, you know, is pretty accurate as far as the pulse that happens within a courtroom. Yeah, that's good. I'll have to check both those out with new lenses based on our conversation. So, Rob, we talked about a lot of things from sort of how we met and Summa health and everything that Summa does for the community. And then we dived into your background, sort of what makes you tick. Then we talked about the role, the chief legal officer.

And wow, even I was surprised at the breadth and depth of your answer. And so again, so happy that you're in the position that you are to lead that. And we talked about the interaction between IT, digital, and legal and sort of what both sides need to know. And then we learned a lot about you, Rob, in terms of what do you do to maintain mindfulness, to maintain your health and different things like that. Is there something we missed in our conversation or anything that you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

Well, thank you. I appreciate you hosting me. and I appreciate all you've done for our organization and bringing your skill set to our board. You know, our board has evolved over time. We've really tried to recruit for skill sets and competencies and having someone with your IT expertise has really added value to our organization.

I think one of the things I might share as a final word is talking to more and more colleagues, this industry right now is really hard, unprecedented hard, and a lot of people are thinking, you know, should I leave and should I try to do something different? I think, though, when we take a step back and we think of all that we do to make,

sure that people get cared during the hardest times of their lives. Hopefully people can continue to stick in. Our industry will get better. There's transformative things that are going on and we're excited about a transaction that we're a part of. I think this industry will rebound and I think those that can continue to best serve these organizations will continue to find it fruitful. I love it. Rob, thanks again for sharing and you shared deeply and I appreciate you sharing your background and how you came to sort of where you are today in terms of who you are as a father, as a man, as a legal profession, professional. And so I really appreciate that. So thanks again for being a guest on Digital Voices. Great. Thanks, Ed. Hey, that wraps up. Another edition of

Digital Voices. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices podcast with Ed Mark. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.