Little Health Law Blog
Your reputation as a medical provider is a commodity you must protect, especially regarding your aptitude for providing patient care. Of course, you may not be a perfect fit at every medical practice. When that happens, your employment may end, and you seek other employment. No harm, no foul.
But what happens when your past employer provides a negative reference to your prospective employer? Worse still, what if the reference falsely criticizes your competence as a medical provider? And what if that false reference costs you the position? Your past employer may be guilty of engaging in improper behavior providing you a remedy at law.
Defamation
se be used and allows physicians to manage chronic illnesses remotely, without the in-person interaction that exposes provider and patient to the risk of spread. This increased reliance on telemedicine has prompted state and federal legislative bodies to pass new rules and guidelines to promote access to telehealth services by reducing costs, increasing availability, and promoting relationships between healthcare providers and their patients. Our Georgia-based business and healthcare law firm follows regulatory developments that impact healthcare providers. As of the date of this post, seven states (Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Maine, New Jersey, Oregon, and Utah) have waived restrictions on telehealth. More relaxation of telehealth rules may be expected.
As a business and healthcare litigation firm focused exclusively on advising and representing health care providers, we work virtually every day with contracts that involve non-compete agreements and other forms of restrictive covenants. Almost all physician employment, for example, will involve a physician employment agreement that contains a restrictive covenant. Typically, a restrictive covenant will apply to prohibit certain competitive activities both during the employment and for some agreed period following employment, often one to three years. The details of such agreements can vary dramatically and, contrary to the impressions of many medical practice owners and employed physicians, there are not “standard” provisions for duration, geographic scope, etc. Further, Georgia and South Carolina case law and relevant statutory provisions are subject to interpretation, about which reasonable minds can often differ.
Because our healthcare law firm often handles employment-related disputes and litigation (for employers and employees alike), we follow developing trends in employment litigation. Employment discrimination lawsuits continue to make headlines in the healthcare industry. Between 2018 and 2019, numerous allegations regarding doctors, nurses, and administrative staff have resulted in litigation challenging existing employment practices of large network hospitals and small practices. For managers and owners of physician practices or small businesses, employment concerns should be regularly discussed with legal counsel.
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.
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.
As the opioid epidemic continues to cause death and create economic hardships within the nation, criminal prosecutors and law enforcement agents have increased their focus on prosecuting and pursuing severe penalties against doctors, pharmacists, nurses and other healthcare providers as a deterrent for providers who would prescribe opioids in excess. For example, earlier this month, a doctor in Kansas was sentenced to life in prison after distributing prescription drugs that caused the death of his patient. Steven Henson, a physician based in Wichita, was convicted of numerous criminal charges after prescribing opioids in amounts that could lead to addiction and economic hardship, after his patient died from overdose. According to the Department of Justice, Henson prescribed maximum-strength opioids in dangerous quantities. Evidence showed that he wrote prescriptions for patients without a medical need and without providing a medical exam. He also post-dated prescriptions and prescribed them in return for cash.
Legislation controlling self-referrals has created a complex road map that can leave doctors with questions regarding their ability to use business agreements to promote lab work and advanced imaging technology for their patients. For physicians, the rules and regulations of self-referrals for imaging can create headaches and lead to fines.