Providing access to high quality services to patients in rural areas is an ongoing challenge in the U.S. Throughout our country, a large percentage of citizens living in rural areas are less healthy than their peers in urban areas, as rural citizens lack access to healthcare providers in their small communities as well as personal financial resources and transportation options that would allow them to travel to larger cities where top-quality or specialty medical services are offered.
Georgia-based Healthcare Lawyers
According to Georgia’s State Office of Rural Health, citizens in rural Georgia are less healthy than those living in urban areas, are more likely to be uninsured or underinsured, and are more likely than Georgians in urban areas to suffer from heart disease, obesity, diabetes and cancer.
More than 2,000 opioid lawsuits are pending nationwide. A large portion of these lawsuits target drug manufacturing companies for their contributions to the opioid epidemic that is plaguing the country.
A sign of the times in the evolution of modern healthcare practice is the prevalence of the electronic health record (EHR). In the past fifty years, technological advances and payer incentives have resulted in a sea of change in healthcare documentation, causing healthcare providers to shift from the historic practice of using paper records to using electronic health records. Healthcare providers navigating the transition from paper to electronic records have encountered many challenges in learning and mastering the efficient and accurate use of EHRs. One challenge with significant and potentially life-or-death consequences to patient health is ensuring that EHRs contain accurate information.
Healthcare fraud attributable to nurses, hospitals, pharmacists, equipment providers and doctors, contributes to the high cost of medical care. For this and other reasons, fraud continues to be a hot topic in the healthcare industry. Recently, there have been numerous headlines regarding Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance company investigations of providers for improper billing practices. Accusations stem from both whistleblowers and audits, making it difficult for providers to hide behind fraudulent billing practices. With numerous investigations in the spotlight in recent months, providers should be alert and act to ensure that they are compliant with the law.
Consulting legal counsel to review a physician’s employment agreement before a dispute arises may increase a doctor’s negotiating power and help obtain better working conditions. Employment agreements contain many provisions, which may include: compensation arrangements, arbitration clauses, terms defining the scope of liability insurance, and non-compete agreements. As physicians in the workplace are tending to move away from working in solo practices, we are finding that hospital, health system and other corporate employment agreements containing non-compete clauses are becoming more prevalent.