Both concierge medicine and direct primary care practices have become popular alternatives to the traditional insurance medical practice model. Direct Primary Care (“DPC”) practices generally cut insurance companies out from the provider-patient relationship. Medicare offers unique considerations because participating and non-participating providers maintain certain responsibilities regarding Medicare beneficiaries, and many…
This is our third blog post on concierge medicine practices this month due to an increase in interest by our business and healthcare law firm’s clients. Previous blog posts provided an overview of what concierge medicine is and an overview of compliance risks under Medicare. This post continues the topic…
Increasingly, our healthcare and business law firm’s clients are interested in opening concierge medicine practices. Hamil Little’s last blog post provided an overview of what concierge medicine is with references to compliance risks. This post outlines those very serious compliance risks for practices that treat Medicare patients and are not…
Both concierge medicine and direct primary care practices have become popular alternatives to the traditional insurance medical practice model. In a previous post, we discussed direct primary care (“DPC”) practices, which are typically different from concierge medicine practices because DPC practices generally cut insurance companies out from the provider-patient relationship.…
Direct primary care practices have become popular alternatives to the traditional insurance medical practice model. Direct primary care practices cut out insurance companies from the provider-patient relationship. This post intends to outline the recent history of direct primary care in Georgia and the relevant rules that practices must comply with…
How could it not? The healthcare industry is rapidly evolving. As recently reported in U.S. News and World Report, next on telemedicine’s horizon may be virtual care clinics. In fact, so-called virtual care will likely revolutionize the delivery of health care in the coming years. “Virtual,” in this context, alludes…
The American College of Physicians (ACP) recently released an informative policy position paper that assesses how “concierge” and similar direct pay health care arrangements between doctors and patients impact patient care. Our Georgia business and healthcare law firm follows developments in the healthcare industry that affect physicians, medical practices and…
A Michigan legislator’s bill, SB 1033, sponsored by Senator Patrick Colbeck, would benefit direct primary care doctors in that State, and the idea may warrant consideration in other States. The purpose of the bill is to provide physicians who convert their practice to a direct primary care model with the…
A well-intended objective of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is to improve patient access to doctors. Sometimes this objective is artfully stated as “better” access to care, rather than “increased” access to care, perhaps to acknowledge the reality that as more patients become insured via the ACA, there may actually…
The strain of health care reform and third-party-payer bureaucracy will likely continue to push physicians towards non-traditional business models for practicing medicine. This is especially true for non-specialists. As the trend of physicians to find viable practice model alternatives grows, it is widely expected that the number of direct pay…