Meet the speaker for the HFMA MA-RI Chapter and the New England Healthcare Internal Auditors (NEHIA) 3-day in-person educational conference
Mary Shirley, Head of Culture of Integrity and Compliance Education at Fresenius Medical Care – Presenting on: Compliance Programs in Organizations outside of Healthcare
- Tell us about your compliance career journey
I have been very fortunate that Compliance is a career that is one that is considered to have a lot of transferable skills across borders. I studied law in New Zealand, which is home, and worked for regulators in the areas of data privacy and antitrust as an external investigator. I then went to Singapore for what was originally supposed to be two years to build a Foreign Corrupt Compliance program for a telecommunications company and that two years has turned into 11 and counting with stops in Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore (again) along the way to my current place of residence which is now Boston. I am currently head of Culture of Integrity and Compliance Education at Fresenius Medical Care and divide my time between the company’s Legal and Compliance departments.
- What one piece of advice would you offer young compliance professionals who are starting out in their careers?
Start networking early. You may think you have nothing to offer others at an early stage in your career but that’s simply not true. A complimentary note to someone you have watched present a webinar, taking a photo of someone presenting at a conference and sending it to them afterwards in case they’d like to show their family, or a post on social media about someone’s excellent article are ways you can send the elevator back up and build relationships with others right from the get go.
- What is one health care compliance area that you think has the potential to change drastically in the coming years that compliance professionals should keep on their radar and why?
I think I’m more worried about risks that we don’t even know are coming and could hit out of nowhere like experienced during the beginning of the pandemic! Though in response to the question I think Telehealth – it’s still maturing and becoming an established area so there’s an expected amount of settling in and figuring it out that has to happen before there is some degree of certainty. One the upside for Healthcare compliance professionals – I think it very feasible that a federal data privacy law will be in place in the US within the next decade. Thanks to existing HIPAA knowledge, any overarching data privacy law will be an easier transition for healthcare compliance teams than others who haven’t had to worry about data privacy on a day to day basis.
- If somebody googled you, what would they not find out about you?
I trained in Tae Kwon Do for several years and I love to bake.
