Can you prescribe for family? What happens if a payer demands a refund three years later? Our Legal Blogs tackle routine yet critical issues—self-prescribing, contract renewals, sham peer review defenses, and medical record ownership—using real complaints, board orders, and court opinions as teaching tools.
When an appellate court clarifies peer-review immunity or a state supreme court limits punitive damages, we translate the opinion into practical next steps: adjust bylaws language, revisit informed-consent language, or refine incident-reporting practices. Posts avoid dense legalese and focus on how rulings might influence documentation, credentialing, and professional liability.
From negotiating call-coverage stipends to spotting restrictive non-compete clauses, articles guide physicians through employment and partnership contracts. We also examine corporate-practice-of-medicine rules, covering management-service agreements, fee-splitting prohibitions, and telemedicine ownership structures.
The blog discusses board investigations stemming from social-media missteps, substance-use allegations, and documentation irregularities. We help physicians respond promptly, assemble supportive records, and protect due-process rights.
Expect discussions of Stark, Anti-Kickback Statute safe harbors, Medicare enrollment revocations, and false-claims liability—presented with examples relevant to office-based specialists and hospital-employed physicians alike.
We search the web every day for interesting, relevant or unusual stories that would be of interest to physicians or could have an impact on their practices. This headline caught our eye;
Guess the Verdict to Support Your Favorite Charity
A New York personal injury law firm is running a contest – they give you the description of an actual personal injury or malpractice case and you guess the settlement. The closest guess to the actual settlement wins an iPad2.
Michael J. Sacopulos, Esq. Several years ago, the National Federation of the Blind filed a suit against the retail store, Target. The issue centered around Target’s website allegedly not being compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. National Federation of the Blind v. Target Corp., 452 F. Supp. 2d 946 (N.D. Cal. 2006) challenged if … Read more
Jeff Segal, MD, JD, FACS It’s a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water. ~ Franklin P. Jones It’s almost irresistible. A prospective patient comes to your office. The prospect says her friend just had surgery performed by your competitor. The prospect asks you about the … Read more
Don’t Let Another April 15th Be Rainy for You: 4 Tax-Saving Ideas You Can Do Now
David B. Mandell, JD, MBA; Jason M. O’Dell, CWM; Carole Foos, CPA
As a physician, do you realize that – between income, capital gains, Medicare, self-employment and other taxes, you spend 40 to 50% of your working hours laboring for the IRS and your state? That is a lot of time with patients for someone else’s benefit. Given the significance of this fact, shouldn’t your advisors be giving you creative ways to legally reduce your tax liabilities? How many tax-reducing ideas does your CPA regularly provide you? If you are like most physicians, you probably get very few tax planning ideas from your advisors.
Given these sobering facts, the purpose of this article is to show you five ways to potentially save and possibly motivate you to investigate these planning concepts now, before the end of the year. Let’s examine them now:
We recently returned from a meeting that included business advisors to doctors. One advisor stated that what we do impacts a trend that has made her particularly sad. This woman, in her 60’s, said she sees residents and fellows graduate from their programs, armed with the latest life-saving techniques, excited to “save the world.” Invariably, … Read more
Jeff Segal, MD, JD, FACS
The race to the bottom is accelerating. A new web site recently came to our attention. (We aren’t naming the site because we don’t want to direct any more traffic to the site than it deserves, which is ZERO. So we shall refer to it as thesitethatdeservesnottobenamed.)
One of our dentist members received an email from thesitethatdeservesnottobenamed bringing a post on that site to his attention. How thesitethatdeservesnottobenamed got the doctor’s email address is anyone’s guess.
OK. The details.
The close relationship between Americans and “the neighborhood doctor” is a strong piece of American mythology. People implicitly trust physicians to use their specialized training to make decisions patients may not fully understand, but always trust. At least, that’s the way things used to be. These days, the atmosphere has changed for the worse; some patients no longer trust physicians and physicians sometimes resent their patients. The question is: why?
David B. Mandell, JD, MBA and Jason M. O’Dell, CWM
, we have consulted with thousands of doctors of all specialties during the last decade. From this experience, we have become intimately familiar with the mistakes physicians make when working with their CPAs, attorneys, and other financial advisors. Whether it is in the area of tax, asset protection, retirement planning, or other areas, the result is almost always the same. We leave the meetings or conference calls asking ourselves, “How could this doctor get such [poor, uncreative, or just plain wrong] advice?” It would be laughable if it weren’t so troubling.It is not surprising that physicians do not get the value they should out of their professional advisors. While the typical specialty physician has nearly 25,000 hours of training in his/her profession, there is a grand total of zero hours of training in business or financial issues related to the “business” of being a doctor. After learning how to utilize specialists in other areas of medicine, doctors receive no training in how to choose or evaluate the advisors whose advice and experience will be the backbone of the doctor’s financial plan for his entire career.
Doctors lack the spare time and training to do their own planning and have literally no training on how to find and evaluate the right specialists to assist them, so it is no wonder that most are ill-served by their professional advisors. To be honest, it is actually surprising when we meet a physician who is financially savvy or is properly advised by a team of professional advisors. In our experience, fewer than 5% of physicians are properly advised by a professional team.
The Two Fatal Flaws Of Physician-Advisor Relationships
Michael J. Sacopulos, Esq.
It was tennis star Andre Agassi that said “Image is everything.” Okay, he overstated it, but Andre did have a point.
Image matters. But does it matter for an expert review of a patient’s chart in evaluating a potential medical malpractice case? The answer is no one knows…yet.
As general counsel for Medical Justice, I thought it might be useful to the members to offer tips on charting.
Voir Dire – Medical Malpractice Jury Selection Process
Joseph Horton, MD
They called me for jury duty last week. As luck had it, there was only one jury trial in court and I didn’t get picked for it. But since I find the experience instructive—and symptomatic of much that I believe to be wrong with our judicial system—I’d like to share the story of what happened Monday.
We entered Judge Harrington’s courtroom where the trial was to be held. Standing next to the bench was a chart that asked each potential juror to state his or her name, address, occupation, name of spouse and spouse’s occupation, and number of children. No clue why they were interested in offspring, but hey—why not? I admitted that I’m a surgeon and a board member of Medical Justice, and that I have a son who also is a physician. I don’t know a huge amount about statistics, but it fascinated me that, of the 33, there were also 5 registered nurses, 4 of whom were currently practicing, plus one who had retired. There was also a fireman with good knowledge of CPR and EMT.
