Health Care

The members of Hancock & Estabrook's Health Care Practice Group are widely recognized as the "attorneys of choice" in Central New York for hospitals, doctors, nursing homes, and other health care providers looking for lawyers who can provide not only overall business and professional legal counseling services, but also practical guidance that can assist them in successfully navigating the complex regulatory world of health care delivery in the 21st century. Our seasoned professionals are unrivaled in their command of the legal issues and trends in the areas of health care regulation and compliance, patient care, and professional licensure. After decades as the top health law professionals in the region, our attorneys are in a unique position to tailor business, transactional, corporate, and litigation legal advice to the special needs of health care clients. Added to that, our attorneys bring one hundred and twenty years of experience to bear on behalf of our clients in the areas of finance, corporate governance and responsibility, employment and employee benefits, environmental compliance and litigation. Health care providers, institutions and individuals alike find Hancock & Estabrook to be a single source for reliable, experienced and practical legal advice that is appropriately sensitive to the complex business and regulatory world that affects health care delivery today.

Mirroring our experience, our health care client base is likewise diverse. We represent hospitals, hospital systems, nursing homes, ambulatory surgery centers, diagnostic and treatment centers, medical professional corporations, home care providers, durable medical equipment companies, and laboratories, as well as individual licensed professionals, such as physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners and physicians assistants. Hancock & Estabrook's clients include for-profit and not-for-profit corporations, private physicians, professionals affiliated with major academic medical centers, and various forms of multi-corporate entities and joint ventures.

Every day, we advise clients in matters ranging from day-to-day patient care and operational matters to large, complex business and financial transactions. For example, our health care attorneys have represented and advised individual and institutional health care providers in the following matters:

• Major taxable and tax-exempt bond issuances, financings, re-financings, and audits;
• Licensing matters and disciplinary investigations by state authorities;
• Medical staff corrective action proceedings. including subsequent court challenges;
• Corporate restructuring, including negotiating affiliation structures, conducting legal due diligence, and securing various state and federal approvals;
• Joint ventures for the delivery of health care services, including ambulatory surgery centers and specialized diagnostic and treatment centers;
• Real estate transactions, including leases, sales, purchases and investments;
• Litigation (and threatened litigation), including antitrust actions, contract disputes, medical malpractice claims and legal actions related to patient care, such as guardianships, release of medical records, end-of life issues and treatment over objection;
• Regulatory investigations, audits, and inquiries, including Department of Health investigations, reimbursement disputes with Medicare and Medicaid, billing audits, fraud and abuse and other compliance investigations;
• Voluntary disclosures of regulatory and reimbursement problems to the Office of the New York State Medicaid Inspector General, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services;
• Employment-related matters, including employee misconduct (such as identity theft), impaired employees, benefit plan matters, and employee grievances (including discrimination claims);
• Compliance issues related to patient privacy, the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and release of medical records; and
• Recruitment and retention efforts aimed at securing needed physicians for underserved, local communities.