Hospitals and health systems operate in a complex, competitive and heavily regulated environment that continues to evolve and change at an unprecedented rate. We understand the challenges and opportunities and help our clients execute their strategic plans and vision to transform their operations and organizations for continuing success in the evolving health care marketplace. In addition to having one of the largest health care practices in the country, we have one of the largest groups specifically devoted to serving hospital and health system clients.

Our team has deep subject matter knowledge in virtually every area of law affecting hospitals and health systems. We work with in-house counsel and serve as outside general counsel to other hospitals. We regularly supplement in-house legal departments through secondment or on-call legal staffing solutions in addition to providing highly focused health care legal services.

Our clients include hospitals and health systems of all sizes and types, ranging from several of the nation’s largest for-profit and nonprofit health systems, leading academic medical centers, teaching hospitals and community or critical access hospitals in rural and urban areas throughout the country.

We help clients execute strategic clinical and business objectives and provide comprehensive representation for health care operations, compliance, alignment, acquisition and restructuring strategies, public policy engagement and government investigations. Our representative legal work includes:

• Development and execution of high value clinical alignment strategies, affiliations, mergers and acquisitions.
• Advice on the expansion into and collaboration with other important segments of the health care industry such as post-acute care, home health, behavioral health, ambulatory surgery centers, durable medical equipment and emerging care models such as hospitals-at-home.
• Support for the continued clinical transformation, including the shift from fee-for-service payment to commercial and governmental value-based payment models such as accountable care organizations, addressing social determinants of health and workforce diversity, equity and inclusion in the delivery of health care.
• Reimbursement analysis, compliance, coding and payer audits, cost-reporting, and challenging payer payment policies and payment denials.
• Regulatory and transactional support, including regulatory compliance, contract drafting and negotiation, and disclosure and defense related to the federal Anti-Kickback Statute, physician self-referral prohibitions (Stark), civil monetary penalties and other fraud and abuse prevention laws.
• Significant experience with hospital and health system governance, including counseling on nonprofit tax issues, issues unique to Catholic health systems and for-profit hospitals.
• Evolving workforce, employment and labor law issues including benefits and safety and health (OSHA) matters and vaccination requirements.
• Regularly address core hospital operations issues, such as medical staff bylaws and peer review, Medicare conditions of participation, hospital accreditation standards, Medicare/Medicaid enrollment issues, EMTALA, telehealth and contracted services.
• Counseling on HIPAA and the protection of data, personal information and protected health information, incident response and cyber security.
• Advice and litigation support for government audits (RAC, ZPIC, Medicaid), government investigations (OIG, DOJ) and defense of qui tam relator cases and complex health care litigation.