Public Health Expert Was Allowed to Opine on the Quality of Care
Posted on December 12, 2025 by Expert Witness Profiler
This is a securities class action, led by Chicago Laborers’ Pension Fund and New York Hotel Trades Council & Hotel Association of New York City, Inc. Pension Fund (collectively, “Plaintiffs”).
Plaintiffs alleged that Acadia Healthcare Company, Inc. (“Acadia”) and several of its current and former executives, including David M. Duckworth, Brent Turner, and Joey A. Jacobs (collectively, “Defendants”) made false and misleading statements to investors regarding Acadia’s business.
Defendants filed a motion to exclude the testimony and opinions of Plaintiff’s expert witness Dr. Ashish K. Jha.
Public Health Expert Witness
Ashish Kumar Jha is an American general internist physician and academic who served as the White House COVID-19 response coordinator from 2022–2023. He has been Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health since 2020.
Prior to Brown, he was the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, and a Senior Advisor at Albright Stonebridge Group.
Discussion by the Court
Defendants did not dispute that Jha is qualified as an expert to opine on the quality of care offered at Acadia’s mental healthcare facilities during the Class Period. Instead, they contended that his opinions on that issue should be excluded as irrelevant because he did not opine about the quality of care offered at Acadia’s facilities “on the whole,” and that his opinions about assessing the quality of care offered at Acadia’s mental health facilities should be excluded as unreliable for failing to provide factual context that Defendants think is important.
Plaintiffs responded by first noting that Jha’s overarching opinions concerned the quality of care offered in all of Acadia’s facilities and that such evidence is highly probative of falsity as to the challenged quality care misstatements. Next, Plaintiffs argued that Jha’s opinions are reliable. Plaintiffs submitted that Defendants’ motion ignored Jha’s detailed explanation, supported by considerable scholarship, of why it was appropriate to compare Acadia’s standalone, for-profit inpatient facilities to other standalone, for-profit inpatient facilities to prevent confounding variables from prejudicing the analysis.
The Court found that Plaintiffs have shown by a preponderance of the evidence that Jha is qualified, his opinions have a reliable basis in the knowledge and experience of his discipline, and that he will testify to knowledge that will assist the trier of fact in understanding the evidence about the quality of care offered at Acadia’s mental healthcare facilities during the Class Period and deciding whether Defendants’ challenged statements regarding the same were knowingly false when made.
Held
The Court denied the Defendants’ motion to exclude the testimony and opinions of Plaintiff’s expert witness Dr. Ashish K. Jha.
Key Takeaway:
Although the Defendants also attacked Jha’s methodology, those arguments did not show that Jha’s opinions are “so fundamentally unsupported that it can offer no assistance to the [trier of fact]” under the facts of this case.
Please refer to the blog previously published about this case:
Economics Expert Allowed to Opine on Stock Inflation
Case Details:
| Case Caption: | St. Clair County Employees’ Retirement System V. Acadia Healthcare Company, Inc. Et Al |
| Docket Number: | 3:18cv988 |
| Court Name: | United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, Nashville Division |
| Order Date: | November 07, 2025 |
