The tsunami of consolidation activity in the dental services industry has created remarkable financial opportunities for dentists and investors. Primarily, these opportunities play out in the form of Dental Services Organizations formed by entrepreneurial dentists and/or private financial interests through the acquisition of established, profitable practices ...
Under its Article 88(1), the GDPR allows Member States to draw up their own rules for the area of employee data protection. Germany has taken advantage of this option with Section 26 of the Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG). The first sentence of Section 26(1) already applies while the decision to establish an employment relationship is made and hence it needs to be taken into account early in the application process ...
To protect and stimulate creators to increase innovation and encourage entrepreneurship, Norwegian authorities are changing the law. In 2018 we received several proposals towards strengthening the rights of those who create new ideas or build their business on intellectual property. Looking back at 2018, we see a year in which the Norwegian intellectual property (IP) legislation has been in movement. Technology is developing fast, and so must the law protecting technology ...
Software is becoming the main part of an increasingly amount of products set on the market; a trend which will become more and more evident in the years to come. This fact challenges the legal landscape and interpretation of product liability laws, and contract makers must pay attention to potential new risks imposed on the parties. If a product causes damages to a third party, complex questions may arise with respect to liability and the chain of causation ...
The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has once again stepped up its oversight of Accrediting Organizations (AOs).[1] On December 18, 2018, CMS issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking to determine whether AOs have a conflict of interest between their governmental contract and their private business. See “Medicare Program: Accrediting Organizations Conflict of Interest and Consulting Services; Request for Information,” 83 FR 65331 ...
On December 23, 2018, new State Medical Board of Ohio regulations became effective which marked another change in the legal standards governing provider use of opiates for treatment of pain ...
PSD2 came into effect in the European Union on January 13, 2018. PSD2 is important as it aims to further harmonise the EU payments market and break the banks' de facto monopoly on the provision of payment services and the use of their customer data. Below is a review of developments to date as they relate to transposing PSD2 into Norwegian law, including an update on the most recent developments ...
The online retail sector has seen a considerable increase in intervention by the competition authorities both on a national level and in Brussels. Most recently, in December 2018, the European Commission fined the clothing company Guess € 39.8 million for applying online sales and advertising restrictions ...
In the latest development in an eventful year, Federal Decree-Law 24 of 2018 introduces amendments to the Federal Penal Code, originally enacted as Federal Law 3 of 1987. The amendments are designed to make the Penal Code consistent with other recent federal legislation and current federal enforcement policies. Only ten provisions of the statute have been affected, out of the more than 400 total articles contained in the statute ...
“Arbitration agreement” is defined under section 19 of the Arbitration Ordinance (Cap 609) as an agreement by the parties to submit to arbitration all or certain disputes which have arisen or which may arise between them in respect of a defined legal relationship, whether contractual or not. Disputes submitted to arbitration may involve contractual claims and non-contractual claims, such as tortious claims ...
Several years ago the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) required skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) to report nurse staffing levels using the SNF’s payroll records, in an effort to obtain more accurate information about actual daily nurse presence in SNFs. CMS has collected this Payroll Based Journal (PBJ) information for a few quarters now ...
On December 7, 2018, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a Proposed Rule that clarifies procedures and criteria for the de novo medical device clearance pathway. In a statement accompanying the Proposed Rule, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb stated FDA believes the Proposed Rule will help facilitate classification of innovative low- to moderate-risk novel medical devices by providing more structure, clarity, and transparency to the de novo pathway ...
On December 11, 2018, Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene A. Depasquale released a long-awaited report discussing the role of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) in Pennsylvania’s health care system ...
Medicare and Medicaid certified nursing homes are frequently required to pay fines (called “civil money penalties” or “CMPs”) to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) when government surveyors find them out of compliance with the Requirements for Participation for Long-Term Care Facilities. It is not uncommon for CMS to assess CMPs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars ...
Executives and in-house counsel should be aware that traveling with sensitive data can lead to its seizure—with potentially severe consequences worldwide. Recently, Parliament in the United Kingdom seized from a traveling executive a USB drive containing data that had been produced in a United States lawsuit between Six4Three, a software company, and Facebook. Put simply, that data was in the wrong place at the wrong time ...
Under the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), large employers (generally those with 50 or more full-time employees or full-time equivalents) must report annually to the IRS information about the health coverage offered to their full-time employees during the prior year using IRS Form 1095-C. The IRS uses the forms to assess whether an employer "shared responsibility" penalty applies. Employers also must provide copies of the forms to their full-time employees ...
Increased federal oversight may be on the horizon for skilled nursing facility involuntary transfers and discharges. The Office of Inspector General (OIG) included in its 2019 Work Plan reviewing SNFs’ involuntary transfers and discharges, focusing on reviewing whether State agencies have effectively investigated and enforced proper transfer and discharge procedures ...
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on December 4, 2018, inHelsinn Healthcare SA v. Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc.as to whether the “on-sale” bar under the America Invents Act (“AIA”) renders an inventor’s private sale to a third party as prior art for purposes of determining patentability. 35 U.S.C ...
Regulation (EU) 2018/302 of February 28, 2018, on addressing geo-blocking and other forms of discrimination based on customers' nationality, place of residence or place of establishment within the internal market (the "Regulation") came into force, December 3, 2018. The Regulation seeks to increase access for customers in the EU and EEA to goods and services by preventing unjustified geo-discrimination due to the customer's nationality, place of residence or establishment ...
Since the GDPR has been in force, almost every company has, among other things, dealt with issues of the permissibility of direct marketing and other marketing activities under data protection law. At their data protection conference on Nov. 07-08, 2018, the German data protection supervisory authorities issued a new "orientation guide" on this topic (as of November 2018) ...
The deadline for meeting the previously issued nursing home compliance mandate is approaching. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued the mandate in 2016 and gave facilities three years to become compliant. On November 28, 2019, skilled nursing facilities (SNF) and nursing homes will be required to adopt and implement a compliance program as a condition for participation in Medicare and Medicaid ...
View a PDF of the November 2018 Edition of the Haynes and Boone Media, Entertainment and First Amendment Newsletter. Must Websites Comply With the ADA? Website ADA compliance litigation is all the rage, manifesting itself as an epidemic of “website drive-by lawsuits.” Beyond the litigation controversy, the issue is whether websites must be accessible to the visually-impaired via screen reader software to comply with the ADA. Circuit Courts are split ...
In a letter to state Medicaid directors on Nov.13, 2018, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Alexander Azar, announced a new demonstration opportunity that will allow states to provide improved care for adults with a serious mental illness (SMI) and children with serious emotional disturbance (SED) ...
Obviously, they are all natural disasters that climate scientists believe will increase in severity and intensity in the coming years. And they are all events that nursing homes and assisted living facilities (and all Medicare/Medicaid certified health care providers) are legally required to prepare for in order to protect their residents and patients. More pointedly, though, they are all events which the U.S ...
