Earl Barnes joins Sentara as General Counsel

Attorney Earl Barnes will join Norfolk, Va.-based Sentara Healthcare as general counsel in June. Barnes comes to Sentara from Chicago-based Amita Health, where he served as executive vice president and chief legal officer. In that role, Barnes managed the legal, compliance, audit, and risk departments, led a 60-person team and managed a $10 million-dollar annual operating budget. AMITA operates 19 hospitals, hundreds of medical offices and other facilities. Sentara is a not-for-profit system of 12 hospitals, more than 300 sites of care and 29,000 employees in Virginia and North Carolina, including the Optima Health and Virginia Premier Health Plans, which serve more than 900,000 members.

Prior to Amita Health, Barnes was senior counsel, Health Care Practice Group, at the law firm Drinker, Biddle & Reath. Barnes has vast legal experience in senior legal roles at complex healthcare organizations including Advocate Health Care Network, where he led the $11-billion merger of Advocate Health and Aurora Health. He also served with OhioHealth Corporation and Northwestern Medicine.

Barnes’ professional successes include risk mitigation, developing acquisition processes, automated billing services, physician compensation plans and office technology modernization to improve efficiencies. Barnes has also worked at Northwestern Medicine to establish legal extern and fellowship program with local law schools.

In his private life, Barnes chairs the Budget and Audit Committee of Just the Beginning Foundation, a nonprofit nurturing interest in law among young people from ethnic backgrounds underrepresented in the legal profession. He also chairs the Committee on Trustees on the Lake Forest College Board of Trustees, his undergraduate alma mater. He is a Board Member of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, and a member of the American Health Law and American Bar Associations. He received his JD from the University of Michigan Law School. 

Barnes will join Sentara on June 2, 2022.