About

Mary Anne Hilliard, executive vice president and chief legal officer for Children’s National Health System (CNHS), started her career as a pediatric nurse, demonstrating a passion for children’s health and bringing this knowledge into her legal practice. After earning her law degree in 1992, she practiced in Washington DC in healthcare law mainly focusing on malpractice defence work and other healthcare law matters. In 1997, she returned to the hospital setting and began her in-house career as associated counsel and risk manager for Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC. Over the next 15 years, she would take on many new responsibilities with her primary focus being litigation management, captive management, insurance, employment law, workers compensation and patient safety. In 2014, she was appointed as interim general counsel and in 2015 she started as chief legal officer. Under her leadership and with the collaboration of a fantastic group of professionals, Children’s National enjoyed an 80% reduction in malpractice liability after implementing high reliability strategies. Since that time, according to a professional actuarial analysis, the legal team has prevented over 100 events of serious harm involving children, and has saved over $70m according to an article published in the ASHRM journal. Since becoming general counsel, Hilliard has transformed contract management achieving a team wide contract turn-around time that went from nine days to four days, and a material improvement in reliable contract capture, legal review, RFP compliance, signatory authority compliance and capture of certificates of insurance. She has also transformed the hospital’s compliance program as evidenced by 100% participation of compliance training by all staff, management and the board; improving the number of internal compliance reports by over 500% (including anonymous phone reporting and online reporting options. Hilliard also handled the settlement of one of the largest false claims allegation in the US involving an independent children’s hospital. She highlights: ‘For my colleagues working in a not-for-profit institution, I’d advise that they remember the mission and link everything they do to the cause. I tell my team that everything we do is for the kids. In fact, our legal office motto is “get it right for the kids.” That’s why we tell the families the truth after we make a mistake. That’s why we connect to our community; they are ultimately who we serve. That means working with high integrity when interacting with our local and federal regulators. It means being on call 24/7 so that we be there to answer a questiwon from a nurse at 2am about whether we can admit a psych patient over the objection of a parent. Importantly, it means linking business decisions to the kids. For example, it means teaching our business partners that contract compliance is important because any waste of resources impacts our ability to provide good care. As a nurse attorney, I have enjoyed the privilege of being uniquely positioned to really appreciate how a strong legal department can have a material impact on mission, in our case that means offering excellent medical care to more kids’.