Supporting Digital Health Innovation
Former law & policy and Spanish major Vicki Morris Tankle ’11 pursued her interest in healthcare regulatory law and policy as counsel and now partner at Reed Smith LLP, where she supports her clients in advancing digital health innovation such as telehealth, mobile health solutions and smart medical devices.
Can you speak to how Dickinson’s useful liberal-arts education helped you along your career path?
At Dickinson, I learned to think critically and outside the box. My professors and peers both supported and pushed me to deeply familiarize, scrutinize and analogize the issues at hand, consider practical consequences of my proposed solutions and communicate meaningfully. This also instilled in me a longstanding commitment to developing others. Today, I continue to use these lessons when advising my clients on novel or complex legal issues by developing effective, innovative and practical solutions to meet their needs and when training junior lawyers to do the same.
What was your favorite activity/organization at Dickinson?
Participating and co-leading Special Friends (now Dickinson Friends), a Dickinson community service student mentoring program that creates opportunities for one-to-one friendships and inclusive living for youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the Carlisle community. After Dickinson, I have continued to enjoy working in the disability space, serving as co-chair of my law firm’s disability inclusion group and representing individuals on a pro bono basis to secure Social Security disability benefits and handle disability guardianship matters.
What jumps out as a great memory from your time at Dickinson?
The Wheel & Chain tapping in spring 2010, when I was honored to stand alongside a group of smart, inspiring and diverse women in my class who were highly engaged leaders in the college and the community and had aspirations to make positive change in the world. These women continue to be my role models and remain some of my closest friends.
What does your current work entail?
I am a health care and life sciences, health privacy and digital health attorney at an international law firm, Reed Smith LLP. My practice focuses on handling regulatory, enforcement and transactional matters for a variety of health industry clients navigating the intersection of health care and technology, including health care providers, suppliers, manufacturers, associations and technology companies.
How did you get interested in your work, and what about it excites you most?
I took several health law classes in law school (at the George Washington University Law School) that not only piqued my interest from a legal perspective but also around the public policies supporting those legal frameworks and how the environments in which people live, learn, work and play impact their health. So, while in law school, I also obtained a master of public health (MPH) graduate degree with a focus on health policy. What I love about my work is that I get to support clients in advancing digital health innovation (think telehealth, mobile health solutions and applications and smart medical devices) and counsel clients on the nuanced interplay of healthcare regulatory compliance in a constantly evolving digital world—the importance of which has been underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic and its lasting impacts on the healthcare industry.
What comes to mind as something unforgettable that you’ve done since you graduated?
When I married a longtime friend and Dickinsonian, Lee Tankle ’10!
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Published April 3, 2023