Health Law Advisor

Despite recent welcome news to the home health agency (“HHA”) industry in Florida, Illinois, Michigan, and Texas following an end to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ ("CMS’s") long-standing HHA provider enrollment moratoria, CMS subsequently announced that it would place some newly enrolled HHAs in a provisional period of enhanced oversight. The purpose of the enhanced oversight period and the corresponding additional restrictions placed on certain HHAs is to help CMS address and closely monitor fraud, waste, and abuse concerns in the HHA industry, thus ...

On March 18, 2019, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a bill amending the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (LAD) to prohibit contractual provisions that result in the wavier of a right or remedy provided under the LAD or prevent the disclosure of information pertaining to claims of discrimination, retaliation or harassment.   The amendment, which is immediately effective, prohibits any provision in an employment agreement, other than a collective bargaining agreement, that:

• Waives any substantive or procedural right or remedy relating to a claim of discrimination ...

The healthcare industry is still struggling to address its cybersecurity issues as 31 data breaches were reported in February 2019, exposing data from more than 2 million people.  However, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) may provide tools to reduce cyber risk.

AI cybersecurity tools can enable organizations to improve data security by detecting and thwarting potential threats through automated systems that continuously monitor network behavior and identify network abnormalities.  For example, AI may offer assistance in breach prevention by proactively ...

Our colleague David A. Clark at Epstein Becker Green was recently quoted in The New York Times, in “Did Your Doctor Disappear Without a Word? A Noncompete Clause Could Be the Reason,” by Michelle Andrews. Read more about the article here.

Consumer privacy protection continues to be top of mind for regulators given a climate where technology companies face scrutiny for lax data governance and poor data stewardship.  Less than a year ago, California passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) of 2018, to strengthen its privacy laws.  In many regards, the CCPA served as a watershed moment in privacy due to its breadth and similarities to the E.U. sweeping General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law.

Yet, California continues to push the envelope further.  Recently, California State Senator Jackson and Attorney ...

The Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) for the Department of Health and Human Services recently issued an Advisory Opinion that provides insight into how the agency evaluates arrangements that deal with the integration of technology, medicine, and patient monitoring under the federal Anti-Kickback Statute (“AKS”). In Advisory Opinion No. 19-02, OIG evaluated whether a pharmaceutical manufacturer could temporarily loan a limited-functionality smartphone to financially needy patients enrolled in federal health care programs. OIG concluded that the proposed ...

One well-recognized way to protect patient privacy is to de-identify health data.  However, trends around increases in publicly-available personal data, data linking and aggregation, big data analytics, and computing power are challenging traditional de-identification models.  While traditional de-identification techniques may mitigate privacy risk, the possibility remains that such data may be coupled with other information to reveal the identity of the individual.

Last month, a JAMA article demonstrated that an artificial intelligence algorithm could re-identify ...

On February 15, 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) finalized two guidance documents regarding regenerative medicine therapies (see FDA’s announcement here). This development comes nearly 14 months after FDA issued both guidance documents in draft form, which also coincided with FDA’s announcement of a new comprehensive regenerative medicine policy framework intended to spur innovation and efficient access to new regenerative medicine products.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb remarked that the finalization of regenerative therapy guidance ...

On February 11th, blockchain advocates, digital health enthusiasts, and patients received positive news from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (“ONC”) regarding patient data sharing.  These rules, taken together, seek to make data more liquid, which can promote patient access, continuity of care, research, collaboration across the industry and several other activities that previously faced challenges within a health care system built on data silos.

First, CMS ...

The New York City Commission on Human Rights published legal enforcement guidance defining an individual’s right to wear “natural hair, treated or untreated hairstyles such a locs, cornrows, twists, braids, Bantu knots, fades, Afros, and/or the right to keep hair in an uncut or untrimmed state.”   The guidance applies to workplace grooming and appearance policies “that ban, limit, or otherwise restrict natural hair or hairstyles”:

[W]hile an employer can impose requirements around maintaining a work appropriate appearance, [employers] cannot enforce such ...