Are you looking for experienced and proven California healthcare business and medical practice attorneys?  The Watkins Firm has decades of more than four decades of experience serving California’s healthcare entities and medical business practitioners and professionals.  We understand the complexities associated with the healthcare industry and the substantial regulatory compliance required to protect your patient’s information as well as the integrity and success of your company or practice.

Proven Attorneys for California Medical and Healthcare Businesses for over 40 Years

In order to be efficient and proven California healthcare business and medical practice attorneys you must have extensive experience and sophisticated understanding of all federal, state and local laws and ordinances.  This begins with the formation of your medical business or healthcare entity.  California has unique and extensive laws which govern the structure and ownership of healthcare practices and medical business within our state.  We help you to understand the laws and advantages they provide as well as how to form and protect your California Professional Corporation, Management Services Organization (MSO), or business entity.

We ensure you and your team are kept up to date on all HIPAA and OSHA issues and Stark Law compliance.  We help to negotiate agreements with medical practitioners and professionals which protect your organization while positioning those who provide services to thrive and advance your company’s business objectives.

We help to structure all medical employment agreements and contracts as well as the processes associated with hiring, onboarding, managing, evaluating and when necessary terminating employees and professionals who are not helping to advance your business goals.  We help you to understand recent changes to California laws regarding independent contractors and the powerful impact this decision may have upon your healthcare entity.

Have you considered the benefits and risks of a Management Services Organization or MSO?  We understand the nature of overhead associated with facilities, equipment and hardware as well as insurance, terminology and billing codes and help to ensure your company has the greatest opportunity to receive payment for the services you deliver.  Is an MSO the right solution for your unique practice or medical business?

Pro-Tip: “Governance and compliance is a challenging concept for any corporate entity, but in the healthcare environment, it’s crucially important.

For example, HIPAA you’re, you’re a doctor. You’ve got to make sure you keep your patients information away from the public, especially from insurance companies who might want to use that to deny people coverage in the future. You have all of these employment laws that are specific to healthcare practices, where your average employer wouldn’t have to comply with them.

You have lawsuits constantly being filed by employees. You have the need for a good employee handbook, ensuring that it’s read and initialed. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been to trial with a healthcare client, and I pulled out the employee handbook that the employee signed. ‘And it says, right here, you initialed here. Well, you promised to do this if any type of incident happened. And instead you went and found a lawyer and filed a lawsuit’ and we’ve won because of that. So having a good employment handbook is wonderful. Having an HR person that is constantly training your staff is important. If you don’t have HR person, you can use ours, but in continuing education, there’s a requirement as employers in the state of California, we have to continually educate our employees and our managers have to have double the education that the employees have to do every year.

So all of these things combined make it really important to pay attention to governance and do your work ahead of time and avoid a lawsuit.

We’ve been representing surgery centers for over 30 years, and there’s more and more types of surgery centers. There’s centers for LASIK, there’s centers for general orthopedic surgery, for cosmetic surgery, surgery centers. When a group of doctors get together and they buy into their own surgery center that is certified by the state and inspected as being healthy, sanitary and safe, or the types of surgeries as they’re rated to be performed there. So you get your knee scoped or you’ll get your shoulder worked on, or you’ll get eye surgery. You don’t need to spend the night in hospital. You go to a surgery center, it’s more cost effective, and doctors can own them under certain guidelines and they can form their own surgery centers.

They can buy into groups, they can sell their ownerships in those surgery centers. And as long as everyone complies with all the laws, they get a good piece of the profit. If it’s profitable in the long run. And instead of giving it a way to a hospital, which is more expensive than surgery centers, the healthcare business is just fraught with danger for professionals, from a regulatory point of view.

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.

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 healthcare clients will be approached by people who want to set up MSOs. And sometimes the driving factor is the MSO itself who will 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 a business or enhance the profitability and success of their existing practice or medical entity.” – Dan Watkins, Founding Partner

You don’t have to worry about the “business” end of things.  The Watkins Firm are experienced and proven California healthcare business and medical practice attorneys. We invite you to review our podcast Episode 30 – Management Service Organization or MSOs as well as the strong recommendations of our clients and contact the Watkins Firm or call 858-535-1511 for a complimentary consultation today.