Objectives:

1. Identify the neonatal injuries most likely to drive litigation, HIE, birth asphyxia, brachial plexus injury, NEC, and IVH and recognize where causation is most often contested in each.
2. Connect standard-of-care findings in the NICU record, nursing flow sheets, physician progress notes and cord gas and Apgar documentation, directly to the causation arguments that decide these cases.
3. Apply a practical framework for spotting the documentation gaps and clinical details that change a damages narrative, and understand where a neonatal-focused LNC review adds value beyond a general chart read.

Bio:

Yana Felix is a neonatal nurse practitioner with dual clinical appointments at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, where she cares for critically ill newborns in Level III and IV NICUs and provides neonatal transport across the region. That intensive care provider bedside perspective is the one most legal reviewers never have, and is the foundation of everything she does.

As a legal nurse consultant, Yana aims to work with medical malpractice attorneys on birth injury, hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, NICU standard of care, and neonatal transport cases. Where a general record review sees a diagnosis, she sees a timeline: the trend buried across a nursing flow sheet, the gap between when a finding should have prompted escalation and when it did, the difference between a valid cord gas value and one compromised by technical error. That is the kind of read that only comes from having stood at the incubator, not just at the deposition table.

Her work is grounded in the same standard used to evaluate expert testimony under Daubert: sound methodology, a defensible clinical basis, and a record built to hold up under cross examination.

She also writes The NICU Brief, translating shifts in clinical guidelines into their legal implications for attorneys building stronger neonatal cases.