Healthcare Finance Expert - Former Hospital CFO

Specialties & Experience of this Expert Witness

Additional Information

Financial expert for healthcare disputes. Ryan O'Meara spent 17 years inside the budgets, financial controls, and governance structures that healthcare financial litigation puts at issue, as a chief financial officer in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs healthcare system with roughly eight years at CFO level over multi-facility systems, annual budgets up to $750 million, and workforces exceeding 2,500. He is currently retained as a financial expert in a confidential healthcare matter and is available nationwide for case review, expert reports, deposition, and trial testimony, for plaintiff or defense. His work centers on the questions he managed in practice for nearly two decades: whether financial controls and separation of duties functioned or were overridden, how executive and incentive compensation structures shaped behavior, and who benefited when controls failed. He supports False Claims Act and qui tam matters through a financial-controls and benchmarking lens, combining traditional controls expertise with data-analytics methods relevant to modern healthcare-fraud detection. Additional areas include budgeting and forecasting, revenue cycle operations, cost allocation, economic damages, and third-party and intergovernmental reimbursement. The underlying record: ranked first in regional financial performance indicators for seven consecutive years; a clean internal audit record across those years; workforce cost forecasting within 0.002 percent on a roughly $260 million salary budget; revenue projections within $120,000 on approximately $24 million in annual collections; service on executive leadership and resource boards governing capital, staffing, and service-line investment; Acting CFO of a Level 1A (highest complexity) VA medical center; Interim Assistant Medical Center Director. Litigation services include financial controls, governance, and incentive-compensation analysis; financial-motive and damages analysis; production-completeness assessment and expert document and data requests; comparative peer benchmarking built from public CMS cost report and provider data; and specification and vetting of coding and clinical co-experts for counsel. Analyses follow a documented, pre-committed methodology: comparator criteria and metric definitions fixed in a dated memorandum before any data is examined, computation from primary sources with verified citations, peer comparisons presented against medians and interquartile ranges, and pre-committed sensitivity testing with all divergences reported. B.S. in Business Administration, Accounting, University of Arkansas (Walton College); graduate-level coursework in federal financial management, Graduate School USA. FinOps Certified Practitioner. Fee schedule on request.