Skip to main content

Hospitals/Health Systems

Jamie Baskerville Martin
jbmartin@williamsmullen.com
EMAIL

Although every hospital and health system has its unique challenges, some concerns are universal: improving access to services and providing the highest quality of care. It takes vision, an understanding of the competitive landscape and insight into the complex health care regulatory environment to do both successfully. Your law firm should be familiar with your long term goals and day-to-day operations and priorities to ensure that the solutions provided are minimally disruptive. Because we routinely serve as general counsel to our health care clients, we can comfortably transition between the strategic and operational levels and meet both sets of requirements.

Access to Care

Growth through mergers, acquisitions or joint ventures can be an effective strategy to attain your goal of improving access to your health care services. We can assist you with every aspect of transactions, including determining fair market value of various services and assets, providing guidance for executive compensation and employee benefits and advising on antitrust issues. Additionally, we are intimately familiar with the regulatory hurdles and tax-exempt issues that relate to mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures such as reimbursement, licensure, Certificate of Public Need (COPN), self-referral and anti-kickback. Our experience in areas such as self-referral has been invaluable to clients setting up various joint ventures.

Quality of Care

In terms of enhancing your patient care, you may determine that you need to increase the number of physicians who provide services at your hospital or hospital system. We have assisted health care clients with a variety of agreements that align their hospital or hospital system with physicians in such a way that all parties are focused on, and rewarded for, achieving the same quality goals. Such agreements include physician recruitment agreements, employment agreements, medical director agreements, management agreements and joint venture agreements. Technology can also improve your quality of service and be a source of revenue for your hospital, if properly implemented. Attorneys in our intellectual property practice, who are very knowledgeable about and have experience with health informatics, regularly assist our health care clients with evaluating information technology and electronic medical record issues, and structure agreements with vendors in a manner that protects intellectual property rights and ensures appropriate contractual protections related to performance. Additionally, we can assist you with obtaining COPNs in Virginia and CONs in North Carolina for a wide range of health services and can negotiate and structure lease arrangements for diagnostic and therapeutic equipment.

Daily Operations

Our attorneys can provide day-to-day advice on a wide array of issues that impact hospitals and health systems, including Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, and compliance issues. Each hospital and health system has its own unique concerns, but some are universal: improving access to services and providing the highest quality of care. Growth through mergers, acquisitions or joint ventures can be an effective strategy to improve access to your health care services. In terms of enhancing your patients’ quality of care, you may decide to increase the number of physicians at your hospital or hospital system. Technology can also improve your quality of service and be a source of revenue for your hospital, if properly implemented. These are just some of the ways we have assisted our health care clients in achieving their goals and steering clear of possible setbacks along the way

View More View Less