The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is temporarily extending current COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) flexibilities for prescribing controlled substances via telemedicine. 

As we covered in detail on this blog (PHE Ending: What You Need to Know), the federal PHE ends on May 11, 2023. At...

Introduction

I'm Scott Rattigan, founder of Functional Lawyer. Way back in March of 2020, there was a lot of excitement because the federal government, the administration, at that time, put into place a lot of waivers for the pandemic, declaring a Public Health Emergency (PHE). Since the PHE is end...

Blog Overview

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) can be complicated.  What are you doing for HIPAA? How confident are you in your HIPAA plans?  More is needed than just a Notice of Privacy Practices and some HIPAA compliant software.  This is not an overwhelming task, b...

Introduction

As most nurse practitioners know, there is a bill called Assembly Bill 890 that Governor Newsom signed into law in September of 2020. In it, he and the legislature have tasked the Board of Registered Nursing to come up with two new categories of nurse practitioners: 103 NP & 104 NP.  W...

The Stark Law, commonly known as the Physician Self-Referral Law, is a federal law that prohibits physicians from referring patients to any entity where they have a vested financial interest for “designated health services” that will be paid by Medicare or Medicaid. Physicians need to be careful to ...

Disclosure Accounting Basics

In HIPAA, we have something called disclosure accounting, and most people are not familiar with this. If you are brand new to having your own practice or brand new to not having a whole HIPAA department available to you, know that HIPAA disclosure accounting is not fina...

Introduction

Not playing by the rules can have serious consequences. At the end of 2022 in San Luis Obispo, California, a nurse practitioner, Sarah Erny, signed a settlement to pay almost $20,000 and was ordered to remove most mentions of herself on the Internet and remove her own website because s...

The Federal Public Health Emergency will end soon, and many states have already set their termination dates for State Public Health Emergencies. Prescribing controlled substances via telemedicine is allowed now during the Public Health Emergency. But what will happen once the Public Health Emergency...

If someone offered you a business plan for $20,000 that could make you $100,000 in the future, but it’s illegal, would you take it?

That’s exactly the situation I came across recently in a webinar, and, believe it or not, many people chose to do it.  This continues to be shocking to me because, in ...

You may be wondering, "Do I need cyber liability insurance? What does (and doesn’t) it cover? What are the two types? What cyber liability insurance is right for me?"

Cyber liability insurance is something I do recommend that everybody at least asks their insurance agent about. Before we go any fur...

Have you heard? In a bit of a stunning move, Alabama has repealed its telemedicine license program in 2022. This sets an extremely negative precedent for the rest of the country. 

I have been providing you with important updates on telemedicine laws around the country, and up until this point, I've...

What is a privacy policy? Why do you need one on your website? What should even be in it? 

These are some of the questions I get all the time from my clients, and a proper understanding of privacy policies can be very valuable. Through this blog, I’ll cover the answers to these three questions, and...