Several years ago, Murtha Cullina anticipated the need to prepare its clients for fundamental changes in the health care system by the formation of its Health Care practice: an interdisciplinary team of experienced lawyers, each with identifiable expertise in the various areas of the law which directly impact on the development, financing, licensure, patient care delivery, quality control, reimbursement and day-to-day operation of both health care institutions and individual professional practices.
In addition to providing assistance to clients with respect to traditional legal issues, the firm has been called on more recently to respond to the demands of a dynamic health care marketplace by assisting hospitals and other health care institutions in completing mergers and corporate reorganizations and in the formation of innovative relationships between all categories of health care providers: the formation of integrated delivery systems, including the development of PHOs, MSOs, IPAs, hospital networks and fully integrated physician groups.
The team approach to client concerns enables Murtha Cullina to provide timely response to client inquiries since team members have an in-depth knowledge of all of the important segments of the health care industry. The practice philosophy recognizes that the health care delivery system deals foremost with profound questions of ethics and clinical quality but is also interrelated with medical economics and third party reimbursement. The practice's interdisciplinary membership includes lawyers with experience in solving problems unique to the health care field: third-party reimbursement, informed consent, death and dying issues, corporate reorganization of nonprofit and for-profit facilities, medical staff relations, shared services, equal access and patient's rights issues, confidentiality of medical records, antitrust, and Medicare and Medicaid fraud and abuse issues.
