Cheryl L. Wagonhurst
Foley & Lardner LLP
Attorneys at Law
Los Angeles, CA 

Cheryl Wagonhurst is a partner with Foley & Lardner LLP and she is a Certified Compliance and Ethics Professional (CCEP). She is a member of the firm's Health Care Industry Team and the White Collar Defense & Corporate Compliance Practice, and focuses primarily on internal investigations, compliance, and health care regulatory matters.

Ms. Wagonhurst designs and implements compliance programs, including assessment of appropriate infrastructures, policy and procedure development, training, development of monitoring and reporting systems and processes. She has worked closely with government enforcement agencies and she has extensive experience in corporate integrity agreement design and implementation. She has conducted over 400 internal investigations and has participated in the negotiation of settlements with the Department of Justice and the Office of Inspector General. She has extensive experience in negotiating with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on a wide variety of issues. She has been instrumental in the development and implementation of a utilization review process (auditing and training) and other quality of care improvements for one of the largest hospital healthcare providers in the country.

Prior to joining Foley, Ms. Wagonhurst was the chief compliance officer at the second largest for profit hospital company in the United States. She designed and implemented one of the largest compliance programs consisting of a multidisciplinary team of over 100 professionals nationwide and was also a member of their new senior management team. Ms. Wagonhurst also previously served as senior counsel on numerous legal and regulatory matters, including EMTALA, licensing, CMS and state surveys, fraud and abuse issues and Medicare/Medicaid billing requirements. She also has experience in managing complex civil litigation and government investigations.

Ms. Wagonhurst is a member of the board of directors of the Health Care Compliance Association and the advisory board of the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics. She also serves on the editorial board of Compliance Today (Health Care Compliance Association) and the editorial advisory board of Healthcare Auditing Strategies (Hcpro, Inc.). She is a member of the American Health Lawyers Association, the American Bar Association, the California Bar Association and the State Bar of California.

Ms. Wagonhurst is a frequent lecturer and author on compliance programs, fraud and abuse issues, integrating quality of care and compliance, and internal investigations. Over the past decade, she has lectured at several national conferences for the Practicing Law Institute; the American Bar Association, the American Health Lawyers Association, the Healthcare Compliance Association, and the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics, and was recognized by Nightingale Healthcare News in "People to Watch - 2004 Healthcare Professionals Making Their Mark."

Ms. Wagonhurst is a member of the State Bar of California and is a graduate of the Whittier Law School (J.D., 1986), where she was a member and editor of the Whittier Law Review. She served as an extern to Judge A. Andrew Hauk, Chief Judge Emeritus, U.S. District Court, Central District of California. She earned her bachelor's degree at the University of Minnesota (B.A., journalism, 1982).