Claire Cowart Haltom advises health care organizations on major transactions and strategic initiatives at the intersection of legal strategy, regulatory approval, public policy, and institutional priorities. Health systems, academic medical centers, medical schools, and other providers rely on Claire for guidance on complex combinations, affiliations, governance matters, regulatory issues, and organizational change – especially when a transaction is highly scrutinized, strategically important, or likely to reshape a market, institution, or delivery system.
Claire has advised on health care transactions totaling billions of dollars, including mergers and acquisitions, strategic partnerships, system restructurings, and innovative affiliation models. Her experience includes several once-in-a-generation transactions requiring state or federal review and approval, including matters involving antitrust oversight, public policy considerations, and highly regulated provider operations. Clients rely on Claire to manage complicated approval pathways, align multiple stakeholders, anticipate risk, and develop solutions that are strategically sound, regulatorily durable, and operationally achievable.
A nationally recognized authority on Certificate of Public Advantage (COPA) transactions, Claire has helped clients secure precedent-setting approvals in multiple states and navigate issues involving state policy, federal antitrust law, regulatory oversight, public accountability, and health care operations. Her COPA work reflects deep experience guiding extraordinary transactions from concept through approval and implementation, where legal judgment, policy fluency, stakeholder engagement, and operational execution must all align.
Her practice also includes significant academic medicine. She advises leading academic medical centers, teaching hospitals, and colleges of medicine on affiliation structures, faculty practice arrangements, governance, clinical expansion strategies, and the operational realities that come with complex academic health care relationships. She is a past chair of the American Health Law Association's Academic Medical Centers & Teaching Hospitals Practice Group and has served as trusted counsel to several premier academic health care institutions.
Beyond her legal experience, Claire is a recognized health care industry leader. She is the past chair of Leadership Health Care and has served on the board of directors of the Nashville Health Care Council. Before law school, she worked in Washington, D.C., as communications director for a United States congressional committee. That policy background continues to inform her work at the intersection of government, regulation, and business strategy. Claire has drafted health care legislation and advised on legislation that has been adopted by numerous state legislatures.
Drawing on this breadth of experience, she brings clients a distinctive combination of transactional judgment, regulatory sophistication, policy fluency, and practical execution in high-stakes health care matters where success depends on clarity, precision, and the ability to navigate uncertainty.