When Glenn Desgranges was diagnosed with heart failure and needed a heart transplant, his nine-year-old granddaughter Alyssa was watching and taking mental notes.
A former Michigan police chief, Desgranges was placed on an artificial heart machine while he waited his turn on the transplant list.
“When my grandpa was put on an artificial heart, he could immediately breathe again and became so much more alert and conversational,” said Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett. “I couldn’t believe how this one piece of technology was not only keeping him alive, but vastly improved his quality of life.”
Three months later, in January 1996, Desgranges became the 396th heart transplant surgery completed at Loyola University Medical Center.
“Science and technology saved his life, and it gave us an extra 10 years with him, and for that I am forever grateful,” she said. “All those experiences I lived through with him led me to end up where I am today, working for a healthcare-technology company that creates software to make the jobs of healthcare professionals more efficient and accurate, in order to save more lives.”
Twenty-five years later, she is the associate general counsel and compliance officer at Medical Informatics Corp., a healthcare-technology company that provides improved patient monitoring and real-time predictive medical analysis.
Despite being a lawyer at Medical Informatics for less than 18 months, Desgranges-Ellett has had a major effect on the operations. She helped create and implement the company’s first contract-management system, led the company’s internal-ethics initiative and mentoring program and is designing the formal return-to-work policies and procedures.
Kyle Verret and Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett
“Alyssa led our company’s legal department on employment-law issues through some of the hardest parts of the pandemic,” said Medical Informatics senior counsel Kyle Verret. “She finds creative solutions to problems faced by our growing med-tech company as we worked to grow through the pandemic. Alyssa has demonstrated her ability to grow and lead, and I expect that she will continue on this course in both service to the company where she works and to the legal profession.”
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Desgranges-Ellett as one of two finalists for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Rookie of the Year.
Desgranges-Ellett and the other finalists will be honored ― and the winners announced ― May 19 at the annual ceremony at the Four Seasons Hotel.
Premium Subscribers: Click Here for a Q&A with Alyssa Desgranges-Ellett, where she describes how her family history and Okinawan heritage give her strength.
“Good lawyering requires careful framing of an issue thorough research and evaluation and actionable advice,” said Medical Informatics Chief Legal Officer Kimberly Fauss. “Alyssa excels at each of these tasks and takes it a step further by following up, debriefing and reality-testing the solution.
“Alyssa is willing to learn in the midst of a question and iterate adjustments in real time for the success of the project,” Fauss said. “She immerses herself in the context of a problem to seek out the nuances that can make the difference between acceptable and excellent.”
Desgranges-Ellett was born and raised in Ionia, Michigan, a small town in rural western Michigan.
Her mother worked at Mercantile Bank in Ionia for 42 years, starting as a file clerk and retiring in 2021 as a loan processor. Her father was an Ionia County sheriff’s deputy for several years but transitioned into the carnival, fair and festival business and also concert promotions.
Desgranges-Ellett lived in Ionia until she graduated from high school. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in legal studies at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. In 2010, she moved to Houston to attend South Texas College of Law, becoming the first person in her family to study law.
“I wasn’t sure what I really wanted to do after I graduated,” she said. “I knew I was about to graduate during the economic downturn in Michigan, and I was worried about finding employment.”
Desgranges-Ellett credits a college professor for encouraging her to go to law school.
She spent the first eight years of her legal career at small boutique law firms in Houston, including the Lee Murphy Law Firm and Stotler Hayes Group.
Both firms had significant healthcare practices. As a senior associate, she specialized in Medicaid eligibility and Medicaid appeals, representing nursing homes and long-term care facilities in helping their residents qualify for Medicaid benefits. This included assisting patients through the Medicaid eligibility process and corresponding appeals from denials of Medicaid benefits.
“My most memorable Medicaid appeal was for a nursing home resident that was denied Medicaid benefits and was instead issued a Medicaid penalty amount of approximately $700,000, which translated to a 10-year penalty period,” she said. “The penalty was imposed due to a sale of real property where they failed to properly show documentation of how the funds from the sale were used.”
Desgranges-Ellett worked with the resident’s family to appeal the penalty, which took more than a year to complete. She successfully got the entire penalty removed and secured retroactive Medicaid benefits back to the resident’s original date of admission to their long-term care facility.
“When all was said and done, the resident and the resident’s family owed a zero balance to the nursing home for services rendered,” she said. “Many of my cases were like that and that’s why I loved the work. I was helping people who truly needed the help.
“The Medicaid regulations are a complicated set of rules to navigate for an attorney, let alone elderly individuals that have no prior experience with interpreting administrative regulations,” she said. “Oftentimes the residents were incapacitated or their funds were being misappropriated by a bad acting third party.”
Desgranges-Ellett said the pandemic caused her to re-examine her priorities.
“Going through such a pivotal time in history made me realize that life truly is fragile and short,” she said. “We spend a lot of time at our jobs, so we should make sure we are doing something that we are truly passionate about and interested in.”
She enjoyed the work at the law firm, but she “toyed with the idea of moving in-house, where I could dedicate my time to supporting one client, every day. “
Any move, she thought, “had to be just the perfect fit.”
The Medical Informatics job posting caught Desgranges-Ellett’s attention and “made me chuckle” because it asked applicants “to submit a joke and create a portmanteau to accompany your application.”
“I loved that,” she said. “It was a way of telling the applicant, we do work differently here … we work hard but we like to have fun too.”
Starting the new job in January 2021 during a pandemic and working remotely was a challenge, she said, because of the difficulty to “get to know people on a personal level when it was just virtual meeting after virtual meeting.”
Fortunately for Desgranges-Ellett, Medical Informatics went back to some in-person work in mid-year 2021.
One of the first major projects Medical Informatics CLO Fauss assigned to Desgranges-Ellett was the company’s “Exposure Control Plan,” which addressed the safe return to the office during pandemic conditions.
“Regulations and recommendations were changing every day by every agency involved,” she said. “Keeping the policy up to date was a challenge and the policy went back and forth through several iterations over the past year. It was a roller-coaster ride to navigate, but ultimately we were able to create protocols to allow people back in the office while simultaneously keeping us all safe.”
Desgranges-Ellett considers her biggest success since joining Medical Informatics was helping address the company’s lack of a fully operational method for handling the contract management process.
“Contract-management software programs are expensive, and none of them seemed quite like the perfect fit we needed,” she said. “So, I built my own contract management tracking system.”
Desgranges-Ellett and Fauss worked on the contract-management system every week.
“It was an absolute labor of love over the months it took us to build,” Desgranges-Ellett said. “It was worth the effort. We now have a contract-management tracking system that is accurate, streamlined and incredibly efficient. After we got it all up and running the way we wanted it to look, I then took the next step of integrating our contract-management system with the established workflows in our sales department and finance department so that all our workflows synchronized to each other.”
Fauss said Desgranges-Ellett’s work interactions has earned her great respect, which has led to leadership opportunities, including a key role in a priority initiative involving internal mentoring.
“Because of Alyssa’s relationships across teams, she has assumed responsibility for leading regular meetings of this group, developing projects and initiatives and organizing the mentor-facilitated team lunch discussions,” Fauss said. “Alyssa’s leadership demonstrates a comfortable balance between implementing our company’s mission of ‘Saving Lives Bit by Bit!’ and personal growth opportunities that enhance the work experience of each member of our team.”