January 14, 2016
After 13 lively sessions and a take home exam, the BU Health Care Fraud and Abuse seminar taught by whistleblower attorney Bob Thomas has finished, with nine 3rd year students and one 2nd year student from Boston University’s School of Law showing real sophistication in this complex field.
The course, which is part of BU’s Health Law Program, is structured in two parts. The first covers the main substantive areas of health care fraud enforcement: the False Claims Act, the Anti-Kickback Statute, the Food Drug & Cosmetic Act, Stark, and the exclusion & debarment remedies. The second part of the course is practice-oriented, with the students hearing from prosecutors, defense attorneys, compliance officers, and whistleblowers and their attorneys in presentations relating to actual cases they were involved in.
Similarly, the take home exam questions are based upon fact patterns that come up in the cases handled or evaluated by the Whistleblower Law Collaborative. If you think you’re as smart as a law student, take a look at the questions they answered quite masterfully. Several of the exams submitted were as good or better than any we could imagine an experienced practitioner writing–a gratifying thing for a “professor” to see, given the multiple demands on the students’ time.
This is the sixth time that Bob Thomas has taught the course. Given all the changes in the law in this dynamic field, he intends to keep offering the course indefinitely in future years as long as student interest remains as high as it has been so far.