Overview
Carlton Fields helps health care and life sciences organizations pursue growth, build strategic relationships, and manage regulatory and operational risk. Our team combines transactional and regulatory capabilities with perspective drawn from prior in-house service in health care organizations and ongoing outside general counsel roles for health care and life sciences organizations. We draw on that experience to work as an extension of clients' leadership teams, aligning legal guidance with organizational priorities, day-to-day operations, and consequential business decisions. Our focus is practical: integrating legal guidance into business planning and execution so clients can move forward with confidence.
We represent academic medical centers, nonprofit and public hospitals, health systems, ambulatory surgery centers, physicians, and other health care businesses. Our team includes attorneys with board certification in health law and credentials in health care compliance, bringing substantive knowledge and operational understanding to complex business challenges.
We guide clients through acquisitions, mergers, clinical integrations, affiliations, and joint ventures, including physician practice acquisitions and transactions involving distressed entities. Our experience includes structuring academic health system relationships, including documenting funds flow and other support arrangements; negotiating hospital-physician affiliations, professional services and co-management arrangements, and employment agreements; and serving as regulatory counsel in public hospital sales and leases. We address both how transactions are structured and how the resulting relationships will work.
Our regulatory counsel supports business planning, compliance, and responses to government scrutiny. We advise on the Stark Law, the Anti-Kickback Statute, HIPAA and HITECH, Medicare Advantage and other risk-based payment models, and Medicare and Medicaid self-disclosures and overpayment refunds. We also assist with licensure, certification, and accreditation matters, defend licensure actions, and respond to HIPAA investigations.
Beyond transactions and compliance, we advise on the daily decisions that affect patient care and organizational risk, including consent, emergency treatment obligations, Florida's Baker Act, medical staff governance, credentialing, peer review, and confidentiality and disclosure issues under the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act. Across these matters, we connect legal analysis with business judgment to help clients evaluate risk, their tolerance for it, and alternative solutions that allow them to move forward with their strategic objectives and missions.
Our broader health care team also defends providers in medical malpractice, facility and premises liability claims, and disputes involving billing and collections practices. This experience complements our transactional, regulatory, and operational counsel when a business issue becomes a contested matter.
Experience
Represented a health system as borrower's counsel in a Florida Development Finance Corporation Healthcare Facilities Revenue Bond offering. The bonds were issued in two series, including $269,890,000 in fixed mode and $133,000,000 in term mode, to fund projects in several counties, including Hillsborough, Citrus, Hernando, and DeSoto counties.
Working with a large hospital to prepare multiple medical staff leader agreements following medical staff elections.
Restated an urgent care business operating agreement to allow new centers to be fully funded by one of the joint venture owners, while others remain under the ownership of the joint venture. In both instances, the joint venture will manage the urgent care operations at the centers.
Represented a public hospital district in the sale of a district-owned hospital, serving as regulatory and transactional counsel.
Counseled a large safety-net hospital on self-disclosures to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Advised a safety-net hospital on the launch of a first-of-its-kind program to deliver blood products by drone to accident scenes.
Represented a multi-physician orthopaedic practice in repurchasing its ownership interest from a large hospital system.
Represented a buyer in the proposed acquisition of an eight-location pediatric urgent care practice.
Represented a nonprofit health care organization in the merger of two affiliated entities.
Represented a hospital in negotiating a master services agreement governing a clinical affiliation with another hospital for oncology services.
Represented a large health system in negotiating a joint venture operating agreement with another major health system.
Represented a buyer and lessee in the asset purchase and long-term lease of a hospital operated by a public hospital district.
Representing a biopharmaceutical company in its structured sale to a private equity firm, with total proceeds of $500 million.
Representing a global contract research and development and manufacturing organization (CRO/CDMO) with annual revenue of $200 million in its purchase and post-closing integration of a distressed seller's bioanalytical services division.
