Healthcare

Exceptional client service is one of Bradley’s core values. We offer practical and useful advice to our healthcare clients with efficiency and cost-effectiveness, thanks to the breadth and deep bench of our health law practice. Since the majority of our clients operate around the clock, we ensure we are available at a moment’s notice to mobilize any response needed to help them. We enjoy working closely with our healthcare clients, providing clear and informed judgment that focuses on proactively avoiding problems, not just solving them once they appear.

Our healthcare attorneys represent nearly every kind of provider and business in the healthcare industry, including the nation’s largest publicly traded community hospital company. Our clients – many concentrated in the southeast, but others spread across the country – include:

• Academic medical centers
• Accountable Care Organizations
• Ambulatory surgery centers
• Behavioral care facilities
• Billing companies
• Cancer care providers
• Dialysis service providers
• Healthcare entrepreneurs
• Home health services and hospice care
• Hospitals, including nonprofit systems and for-profit “chains”
• Imaging companies
• Nursing homes and assisted-living facilities
• Pharmacies
• Post-acute and long-term care facilities
• Rehabilitation hospitals and outpatient rehab
• Substance abuse recovery providers
• Urgent care and walk-in facilities

Bradley’s Healthcare Joint Ventures practice features a multidisciplinary team of business and healthcare attorneys with specific experience in corporate, tax, tax exemption, and various regulatory fields. We have extensive experience in counseling clients on the formation of both ancillary joint ventures – such as surgery centers, imaging centers, and sleep centers – and whole-hospital joint ventures.

Our attorneys assist with the preparation of offering memoranda, partnership agreements, operating agreements, leases, management agreements, development agreements, and other documents needed in the context of joint venture formation. Our team has experience with all areas of law required for syndicated joint ventures, including federal and state securities laws, healthcare regulatory laws, corporate and business laws, and tax laws. We also assist clients with issues involving governance, fraud, and abuse such as the Federal Anti-Kickback Statute, Stark Law, and state anti-kickback and self-referral issues, as well as reimbursement, including under-arrangement billing and provider-based issues.

Our practice includes experienced antitrust counsel, who provide advice to providers on hospital joint venture formations and operations with other providers and health systems, such as issues with Copperweld compliance and attainment of financial integration or clinical integration. Our tax attorneys are highly skilled in working with joint ventures involving tax-exempt organizations and academic medical centers, including exemption and unrelated business income tax (UBIT) issues that arise in joint venture transactions.

Members of the Bradley team routinely advise long-term care companies in matters relating to acquisitions, dispositions, restructuring and reorganizations, financing, development, and construction. We also have extensive experience in survey and certification matters, conducting due diligence in acquisitions and financial transactions, and assisting providers in developing and implementing various types of business agreements.

Post-acute providers face myriad regulatory requirements affecting their day-to-day operations. Bradley works with clients to minimize risk and maintain compliance with HIPAA, the Deficit Reduction Act, the anti-kickback law, the False Claims Act, and comparable state laws that present risk for civil or criminal liability. In the event that noncompliance is suspected or discovered, we coordinate and conduct internal investigations and assist clients in investigations conducted by state Medicaid Fraud Control Units, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. attorneys.

The firm’s lawyers also stay up to date on changing self-reporting requirements and provide reasoned advice on approaching and disclosing potential problem areas to regulatory authorities. We have successfully limited client exposure and managed countless investigations through their conclusions or through litigation brought by governmental entities or qui tam relators.

Bradley attorneys work closely with our clients to gain a deep understanding of their businesses so we can provide effective counsel on their day-to-day activities. We are constantly expanding the range of legal services we offer to meet the growing needs of integrating post-acute and long-term care facilities. Our lawyers are comfortable with and experienced in guiding providers through legal and regulatory processes, as well as acting as a liaison to the governmental and regulatory agencies that oversee the operations and activities of our clients.

Our broad experience in the healthcare field means our lawyers have the tools to handle the unique challenges of designing a program for managed-care integration. Bradley’s healthcare team understands the intricacies of the complex rules and regulations of Medicare and Medicaid, and works with post-acute care providers in all aspects of these critical funding systems. We also assist clients with other commercial, legal, and regulatory challenges, including mergers and acquisitions, HIPAA, litigation, ancillary service agreements, and occupancy issues.