Health Law Advisor

Our Epstein Becker Green colleagues have released a new Take 5 newsletter: “Five Labor and Employment Issues Faced by Health Care Employers,” by Michael F. McGahan, D. Martin Stanberry, and Daniel J. Green.  Below is an excerpt:

As the Affordable Care Act and the challenges of reimbursement and funding for health care services drive changes in the health care delivery system and employment in the industry, new issues in labor and employment law are arising.   This month’s Take 5 addresses five of these new and important issues…

1. NLRB’s Proposed Changes to Its Union Election ...

For a physician who has spent his or her whole professional life developing and growing a medical practice, the process of selling that practice can be a traumatic experience.  Typically, the physician may focus on the short term, attempting to maximize the price at which the practice will be purchased and the applicable payment terms.  However, the long term happiness of the selling physician may depend less on the size of the purchase price at which the practice is sold, and more on how well the physician negotiates the terms and conditions of employment following the acquisition ...

According to the 2011 Medical Group Management Association's Physician Compensation and Productivity Report, more than one-third of physician group practices in the U.S. are using some type of "work relative value unit" (commonly known as a wRVU) structure for compensation purposes, and more than 60% of physicians are paid on the basis of some type of wRVU metric. So, physicians clearly have some familiarity with the wRVU concept and its application in calculating physican "pay for productivity" compensation.

However, while wRVU models generally provide compensation ...