New York, New York, United States
Wendy Chow is General Counsel for Cityblock Health. At Cityblock, Wendy leads the legal department and both designs the legal strategy and also manages the company's day-to-day legal needs. It is her personal philosophy to provide practical and strategic legal leadership to support the fluid operation of a complex, highly regulated organization in changing times. Prior to her work as in-house counsel, she was in private healthcare practice at firms in New York and Nashville. Wendy holds a B.A. from Emory University and a J.D. from Loyola University College of Law, New Orleans. She is passionate about the power of written communication and spends her free time writing and teaching workshops to women on negotiating in the workplace.
Cityblock Health aims to build a scalable solution to address the root causes of health for underserved urban populations. We partner with provider organizations, health plans, community social services agencies and communities themselves to ensure Medicaid and lower-income Medicare beneficiaries have access to high-value, readily available personalized health services. To do this, we will apply leading-edge care models that fully integrate primary care, behavioral health, and social services. And we will use our custom-built technology to enhance strong relationships between members and care teams, while simultaneously empowering and incentivizing the health system to do better.
As Associate General Counsel at VNSNY I handled day-to-day healthcare and general corporate legal matters for all entities in the VNSNY organization, which included a licensed home care service agency, a certified home health agency, a hospice, a managed care company, and the corporate parent. The VNSNY family of corporations collectively employ over 16,000 people and generate revenue in excess $1.9 billion. Making the move to in-house counsel affirmed my raison d'être as an attorney - to help smart people solve hard problems. So naturally, as a AGC, what I loved most is collaborating with business owners to find creative, but compliant solutions to complex health care issues. Specifically, I drafted and negotiated all types of health care contracts (payor, provider, vendor) and advise on federal and state health care regulatory issues. I managed outside counsel on a variety of legal matters and oversee our team of paralegals and the work of other contracting departments. During my tenure I systematically developed processes to streamline legal requests and maximize legal department efficiency. These new processes increased our department's throughput 10x without hiring any new FTEs or increasing our outside counsel spend.
Women inPower is a dynamic cross-sector fellowship program designed to help high-potential women advance the top levels of leadership in their fields. This one-of-a-kind program provides a select group of female leaders in New York City with executive mentorship, educational training and workshops, and membership in an active community of female leaders. The Fellowship is 12 months long — from January through December. It includes one-on-one and peer mentorship, CEO workshops, networking events, as well as educational seminars and activities that address key topics women face when taking the next step in their career. Women inPower is a unique opportunity for women across sectors and industries to come together to create new pathways to career success. I am honored to have been chosen for the 2018 Fellowship class.