Health Law Advisor

SB 951, which bolsters existing Oregon law prohibiting the corporate practice of medicine (CPOM), passed the state House of Representatives on May 28 and now awaits the signature of Governor Tina Kotek.

As EBG noted in a recent blog, the majority of states have some form of CPOM restriction. Oregon’s doctrine stretches back to 1947, when the state supreme court in State ex. rel. Sisemore v. Standard Optical Co. of Or. banned corporations from owning medical practices, practicing medicine, or employing physicians.^[1]

Since then, however, Oregon has sought to strengthen its CPOM rules legislatively, as entities have “sought to circumvent the ban through complex ownership structures, contracting practices, and other means,” as SB 951 states.

While we wait for long-anticipated federal regulations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) addressing the issue of workplace violence in health care, activity continues at the state level.

California and North Carolina are among those currently filling the gaps—with the latter bringing law enforcement officers into hospital emergency departments to address the problem, and the former legislating to keep weapons out (through screening devices).

These laws are the latest developments in the national landscape of initiatives designed to address workplace violence in health care facilities. Though a federal OSHA standard is slated to issue by year-end, it remains to be seen whether that will happen and what effect, if any, the 2024 presidential election might have on those plans.

We recently wrote about proposed Oregon legislation that would have addressed workplace violence in healthcare settings but failed to move forward in the legislature due to concerns about a provision that would have made assault on a hospital worker punishable as a felony.

This was not a concern that troubled the Kentucky legislature, which on March 27, 2024, signed and delivered to the state governor a bill relating to workplace violence against healthcare workers. The Kentucky legislation expands the offense of assault in the third degree perpetrated against a variety of ...

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a case challenging the sufficiency of due process protections in the Health Care Quality Improvement Act (HCQIA) and National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), effectively confirming that the current safeguards are constitutionally sufficient.

In Doe v. Rodgers, a surgeon brought an action against the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the NPDB, and several individual officials who administer the NPDB, alleging that the NPDB wrongfully accepted, kept, and distributed a “false and ...