The Effect of Health Care and Malpractice Prosecutions on Health Care Providers: A Teaching Tool for Compliance Officers

The convergence of quality of care and compliance is clear. Compliance officers must connect adherence to regulatory compliance, provision of high quality of care by physicians, and the potential for medical malpractice actions. Joint ventures, management, co-management, and other business relationships involving physicians, medical practices, hospitals, and health care systems are rapidly increasing across the US as anticipated. The alignments between physicians, hospitals, and health systems create new compliance educational needs and risks to health systems on a number of levels, including medical malpractice and health care fraud as previously reviewed. The compliance officer must recognize that these issues are related to both health care prosecutions and medical malpractice lawsuits and utilize that knowledge to connect with and teach physicians the importance of the intersection between quality of care and compliance as it relates to their own professional reputations and careers. The key to preventing potential health care fraud problems is education. Presenting this information to physicians and health care providers creates further discussion and teaching points for the compliance officer.