Healthcare and FDA: Healthcare Employment
Healthcare organizations are regularly faced with employment and benefits challenges unique to their industry. Whether it is managing a highly unionized workforce, mitigating open campus environment conduct incidents, managing employee health records, developing vaccination programs, navigating complex benefit plan issues as both an employer and provider, addressing regulatory requirements related to medical staffing and virtual care, or accurately classifying and compensating physicians and salesforce members, our Healthcare Employment team is adept at addressing the challenges facing healthcare employers.
We bring together a global, industry-focused team committed to the success of healthcare organizations, large and small, in their critical and ever-evolving relationship with employees, temporary personnel, and contractors. Our full-service, integrated team supports healthcare industry participants in the areas of labor, employment and workplace safety, immigration, executive compensation, and employee benefits. The team’s range of work includes ensuring legal compliance in a heavily regulated market, mitigating employment risks, structuring benefits plans and compensation and incentive arrangements that are beneficial to both companies and their employees, and supporting the recruitment and employment of the best talent globally through our Immigration practice group.
Our capabilities include:
Labor, Employment, and Workplace Safety
We regularly counsel healthcare organizations such as hospitals, clinics, senior care facilities, and academic medical centers, among many others, on a complete spectrum of labor, employment, and workplace safety issues across the globe. Our breadth of work spans the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia, and includes conducting complex employee investigations, providing assistance with affirmative action initiatives, advising on workplace safety compliance, protecting proprietary information and trade secrets, and implementing background screening programs. In addition, we have extensive experience handling disputes regarding physician compensation, allegations of discrimination, retaliation, and harassment, and classification of workers under wage and hour laws. In Australia, we regularly provide advice to public hospitals on navigating the complex enterprise agreement system. We also advise on a full range of global labor union, industrial relations, and works council issues. Our experience includes everything from training on union avoidance to negotiating and administering collective bargaining agreements to defending against administrative charges, contract grievances, and litigation. Our work also extends to counseling on the labor and employment aspects of transactional matters, with particular experience related to the antitrust considerations connected to the highly regulated pharmaceutical market.
Immigration
Our Immigration team aids healthcare employers seeking to hire highly skilled foreign workers in the United States. We have assisted hospital systems, medical research organizations, medical device manufacturers, and academia with temporary work visas, physician J-1 waivers, and permanent residence (PERM, EB-1, NIW) for caregivers and technical professionals. For example, foreign medical graduate physicians, nurses, scientists, therapists, pharmacists, social workers, researchers, technicians, and software developers.
Employee Benefits
We advise on numerous retirement plan, health and welfare plan, and executive compensation issues, including in relation to tax-exempt entities and nonprofits. Our experience includes advising on benefit plan considerations such as unique provider and plan contracting and fiduciary duty issues, wellness questions, compliance obligations related to on-site medical clinics, and HIPAA privacy and security considerations.
In addition, we have extensive experience in handling a myriad of regulatory requirements affecting healthcare employers and their benefit plans and compensation and incentive arrangements in the United States under the Internal Revenue Code, ERISA, COBRA, HIPAA, and the Affordable Care Act, including required plan documentation, participant disclosures, reporting obligations, and regulatory filings.
