Colette G. Matzzie

In 2015, Colette G. Matzzie and her colleagues filed a whistleblower lawsuit for Brendan Delaney, a software technician who had helped implement electronic health records at Rikers Island. Delaney alleged that the eClinicalWorks system mixed information from different patients, mishandled medication records, and failed to track laboratory results accurately. He had documented problems that could put patients at risk; Matzzie's team worked with him and federal investigators to examine the software and the company's representations about its performance.

Federal incentive payments encouraged health-care providers to adopt certified electronic records. Certification required a vendor to satisfy federal criteria and pass independent testing; providers relied on that certification to qualify for the payments. The government alleged that eClinicalWorks had concealed deficiencies from its certifier, including entering the sixteen drug codes needed for a test rather than enabling the software to retrieve any code from a complete database. Investigators could compare the test version, the software in use, and the written requirements. The government also alleged failures involving audit logs, imaging orders, drug-interaction checks, and the transfer of records to other vendors, as well as payments to customers for recommending the product.

The case resolved for $155 million in 2017, the first major False Claims Act recovery involving an electronic-health-records vendor's certification. The accompanying agreement required independent software oversight, safety notices to customers, free updates, and the option to transfer records to another vendor without additional charges. Matzzie called the steps alerting customers to patient-safety risks the most important outcome. She credited the close collaboration among Delaney, his lawyers, and the government team, singling out Assistant U.S. Attorney Owen Foster's work.

Public-Interest and Government Practice

Matzzie graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a senior articles editor of the Georgetown Law Journal, and clerked for Judge Dolores K. Sloviter of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She received the Frederick B. Abramson Public Service Award in 1995. For the next four years, she worked at Public Citizen Litigation Group on public health and safety, consumer protection, access to information, and access to the civil justice system.

She then spent five years on the Justice Department's civil appellate staff and also served as a trial attorney on its tobacco litigation team, earning a Special Commendation Award. She subsequently joined Phillips & Cohen, where she is a partner in the Washington office, and has also taught a public-interest advocacy seminar as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown.

Clinical Records and Referral Payments

In the Modernizing Medicine case, Matzzie and Tristram Coffin represented Amanda Long, the company's former vice president of product management. The government alleged that the vendor accepted payments to steer clinicians toward a preferred laboratory, helped subsidize software to generate laboratory orders, and paid customers and others to recommend its electronic records. It also alleged that the software did not always permit use of the standard drug and clinical vocabularies required for federal incentive payments. The case settled for $45 million in 2022. Matzzie emphasized the risk that undisclosed laboratory arrangements could influence clinical decisions.

The NextGen Healthcare case began with two clinical providers, Elizabeth Ringold and Toby Markowitz, who used the software in South Carolina's prison system. The government alleged that NextGen passed certification testing with functions embedded in a temporary version of a related product, while the software released to providers lacked required capabilities. The alleged deficiencies affected problem lists, family medical histories, referral summaries, and the recording of vital signs. The case also involved payments for software referrals and resolved for $31 million in 2023.

Together with eClinicalWorks, those resolutions exceeded $200 million. Matzzie represented clients who could identify failures in clinical use or explain a vendor's product and sales decisions, allowing investigators to test their accounts against software behavior, certification rules, and payment records. She has addressed cybersecurity, technology fraud, and health-care enforcement at conferences attended by whistleblower lawyers, compliance officers, and government attorneys.

Drugs and Government Contracts

Matzzie's pharmaceutical work includes representing a whistleblower in the $95 million Boehringer Ingelheim resolution over off-label promotion — marketing approved drugs for unapproved uses — and kickbacks. In the separate Hawthorn Pharmaceuticals case, she described whistleblower litigation as a means of stopping sales of drugs that had not received the required approval. Her government-contract cases include the $93.5 million Verizon settlement over alleged overbilling on federal telecommunications invoices and the $11 million AAR resolution over aircraft maintenance.

In the Sodexo case, which settled with New York for $20 million, whistleblowers challenged the company's retention of supplier rebates that should have reduced costs for public schools and universities. Matzzie later represented Jeffrey Mills, the former director of food and nutritional services for Washington's public schools, in his challenge to the district's food-service contractor, Chartwells.

The School-Meal Contract

Mills had introduced breakfast in classrooms, after-school suppers, and salad bars during his three years with the school district. His 2013 lawsuit alleged that Chartwells caused the schools to overpay while meals arrived late, in insufficient numbers, or in poor condition. Matzzie identified the conflict between the contractor's purchasing arrangements with suppliers and its obligation to provide nutritious meals at the lowest available price.

The District's attorney general joined the case after an investigation, and Chartwells paid $19.4 million in 2015. Matzzie and Mills credited the government lawyers who helped recover the funds. In 2018, both his case and Delaney's were featured in an episode of CBS's Whistleblower that included interviews with Matzzie. Discussing the school-meal case, she explained that although the suit sought recovery for the government, "our goal was always to ensure quality school food programs for the kids."