Health Law Project
What is Health Law?
Health care, a heavily regulated, complex market that comprises a large segment of the United States economy (approximately 1/7 of GDP), consistently faces new challenges from private and public payers, drug and medical device manufacturers, health care providers and suppliers, and federal and state governments. Given these ongoing challenges, the discipline of health law has developed over the last 25 years as a significant and multi-faceted area of legal study and practice. From an academic viewpoint, the study of health law begins with a fundamental working knowledge of basic contract, corporate, tort, criminal and administrative law, which serves as the underpinning for more advanced studies of special state and federal law and regulations and industry practices.
The landscape of the health care industry is constantly changing. Given that, health lawyers must maintain a level of knowledge and expertise in a variety of fields, particularly in areas such as fraud and abuse; Medicare and Medicaid and other federal and state governmental coverage, coding and reimbursement issues; hospital-physician relations; medical research and biotechnology; medical liability; mental health; ERISA; access to health care; health care financial transactions; compliance; health litigation, both criminal and civil; and patient privacy regulations. A health lawyer may represent a client in specialty areas of the law such as corporate, administrative, securities, contracts, intellectual property, tax, and litigation, and may have to deal with ethical and bioethical issues such as violation of professional ethics, human research protocols, and patients' rights.
Health care attorneys represent a wide spectrum of health care organizations, in various capacities from in-house general counsel, to special counsel on particular, complex matters. Health industry organizations include, among others, hospitals and hospital systems; physicians, dentists, and other individual practitioners; nursing homes; home care companies; pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers; insurers such as HMOs; and medical research and teaching institutions. As such, health care lawyers' representation of these types of clients covers all aspects of the law that would affect these business entities.
