Are you searching for legal strategies to manage growth in San Diego healthcare businesses and professional practices? The past few years have brought continuing challenges and significant change in how medical services and treatment are delivered, and how insurance companies, Medicare and the federal government compensate those providers.

The path ahead is fraught with challenges, potential risks, regulatory complexities and change.  How will your organization reduce areas of expense while increasing the quality of services and care you provide?  How can you maximize reimbursement for the services and products you offer?

Old models of medical practices in the California medical community are being stressed and challenged by the pandemic as well as the implementation of recent regulations and health care initiatives. Many physicians and professional practices are blending into larger health care providers such as Scripps, Sharp or Kaiser Permanente.  Separate and independent medical practices are still thriving in the San Diego area, and new opportunities for concierge healthcare services are looming on the horizon.  How will you navigate these challenging times and what are some of the modern legal strategies to manage growth in San Diego healthcare businesses and the delivery of related services?

One example is the recent increase in the formation of Management Service Organizations or MSOs.  An MSO allows medical practices and healthcare entities to streamline operations and costs by allowing a management entity to bring expertise and efficiencies to the day-to-day business necessities of a practice or medical entity.  A Management Service Organization can centralize and provide more efficient support from the acquisition and management of facilities to contracts with supporting vendors.  MSOs are now even handling operations such as billing, regulatory and tax compliance and even collections.  The Watkins Firm brings more than 40 years of experience in the formation, acquisition, and change management strategies required in today’s competitive healthcare vertical.  Our experienced medical and healthcare business attorneys provide sound counsel in these challenging times.  We work to keep you and your entity in full compliance with all federal, state and local laws, ordinances and regulations.

Pro-Tip: “Consider an MSO like your administrator for your business. But if you’re in the healthcare business, your administrator can’t do it all. It’s complicated. And there are actual schools that can take people to learn some of the things that your administrator’s supposed to do, like coding, like billing, like compliance, like HR, like leasing, like software programs. So many things that you have to deal with so many more clients, patients, you have to do so much that MSOs are a good option. Also, you can get non-doctors to partner with you and invest in your company to make you more profitable while you focus on being a doctor.

What’s the principle benefit of owning both a Management Service Organization and a separate entity for your practice?  Well, let’s consider two dynamics here in how the government has established an MSO for doctors. On the one hand, the evil side, they don’t want doctors to have what is called corporate practice of medicine, right? Where corporations can say, you know, the kidney’s fine.  It costs too much. They don’t want that. So there’s all these laws stopping non-doctors, investors, entrepreneurs from coming into your practice and saying, you can’t do that for this patient. Medical decisions are made by licensed medical professionals, period.

MSOs are different for every kind of practice. And every kind of practice has a classification under the code as to what they can’t do, who they can’t hire, and who they can practice medicine with, or who can supervise who. And we do that with various different types of ancillary service organizations, which means like X-ray companies, MRI, PT, physical therapy, imaging, all those things that you run your business with and the rules on how you can and cannot work with them, those can be covered with your MSO.

Sometimes our clients are approached by people who want to set up MSOs. And sometimes the driving factor is the MSO itself who’ll go out and locate a doctor and say, ‘look, I’ve got this great business model. We collect more. We save your personal time and we make you more profit, once you come with us.’ Then they’ll come to us and say, write up a custom MSO with this doctor in mind with these parameters, and set it up for us. And we do that. We bring two parties together and write it up in such a way that they can start an MSO business, to help make the practice more competitive overall, and to allow medical professionals to focus on the delivery of exceptional healthcare.” – Dan Watkins, Founding Partner

If you are selling your practice to a large entity, are forming a new medical practice or healthcare related business, or are in transition from one practice to another we would like to help.  You need legal strategies to manage growth in San Diego healthcare and the Watkins Firm has more than four decades of experience here in San Diego, and throughout California.  We are committed to supporting physicians, medical practices and professionals to help them thrive and prosper.  With change comes substantial opportunity.  We invite you to review our podcast Episode 30 – Management Services Organizations as well as the strong recommendations of our clients and contact the Watkins Firm or call 858-535-1511 for a complimentary consultation today.