Health law is the federal, state, and local law, rules, regulations and other jurisprudence among providers, payers and vendors to the healthcare industry and its patient and delivery of health care services; all with an emphasis on operations, regulatory and transactional legal issues.
I’d run out of fingers and toes if i had to recount the rash of remarkably bad legal guidance given to well meaning chiropractors looking to integrate various medical services to their practice. They hook up with an experienced business firm, a Management Company, that specializes in that area, but then get advice from a buddy or a lawyer who simply doesn’t have the depth of experience to correctly advise them. The Management Company is happy because they don’t know the lawyer is oversimplifying things, which has the effect of a stream of chiropractor clients rolling into the Management Company. Well done, except it’s often not!
A January 24, 2014 court ruling in Idaho that will require the unwind of a hospital system’s purchase of a large primary care medical practice will cause mega practices to think twice about their size. The Idaho court ruled that St. Luke’s Health System’s purchase of the 40 physician Saltzer Medical Practice violated pertinent state and federal antitrust laws because the group had 80% of the primary care physicians in Nampa, Idaho, a city of roughly 85,000. The suit was brought by two competing hospitals and succeeded, despite St. Luke’s claims that integrating the practice would improve the quality of care.
Beginning January 1, 2013, healthcare organizations owned by both chiropractors and M.D.s (or D.O.s) will have to obtain a Florida Health Care Clinic License (HCCL) in order to take care of patients whose care is compensated by PIP. These sort of “integrated practices” are clearly on the upswing, especially after the tough new PIP Clinic regulations were passed this year, which makes providing care to patients injured in motor vehicle accidents tricky. read more
By: Jeff Cohen