Health law

Not to be confused with Medical law.

Health law is the federal, state, and local law, rules, regulations and other jurisprudence among providers, payers and vendors to the health care industry and its patients; and (2) delivery of health care services; all with an emphasis on operations, regulatory and transactional legal issues.[1]

In the U.S. particularly medicine and the law are interconnected. The law intervenes to regulate the duty to treat, that essentially is ruled by contract law, which gives doctor the right to refuse treatment, in the absence of an emergency, when not previous doctor patient relationship existed. However Doctors cannot discriminate because of disability, ADA, abandon a patient, and not render services in an emergency according to EMTALA (it aims doctors in emergency rooms, where they need to screen, stabilize and transfer. It also regulates the fiduciary duties of doctor-patient, such as privacy HIPAA, informed consent (battery unlawful touch), conflict of interests, (Moore case) etc. Medical malpractice is also an area where law and medicine are interconnected, which it relates to the standard of care, where custom similar locality rule may apply. There may be different schools of thought, where reputability is the issue at hand, and alternative theories that can be based on the hand formula. There are other aspects of importance within the area of medical malpractice, such as causation, where medical probability and loss of chance are present. Damages, where the value of life and tort reforms appear to differ, and affirmative defenses, within the doctrine of informed consent, where waivers cannot suffice. There are rules such as the discovery rule that states that the statute of limitations starts to run when the injury has been discovered and not when it took place.

Medical Liability and Treatment relations Third Edition[2] [3]

(--Edwin Duque--)

Some areas of law it includes are:

Basic terms

The terms "legislation" and "law" are used to refer generically to statutes, regulation and other legal instruments (e.g. ministerial decrees) that may be the forms of law used in a particular country.

In general, there are a wide range of regulatory strategies that might be used to ensure people's health and safety. Increasingly, regulators are taking an approach of "responsive regulation". This involves using mechanisms that are responsive to the context, conduct and culture of those being regulated, providing for a range of regulatory mechanisms to achieve the behavior desired. Where appropriate, the aim is to use incentives before sanctions. However, when those being regulated do not respond accordingly, escalating sanctions can be invoked. These strategies may be broadly classified into five groups:

  1. voluntarism: voluntary compliance undertaken by an individual organization without any coercion;
  2. self-regulation : for example, an unorganized group that regulates the behavior of its own members through a voluntary code of practice;
  3. economic instruments: for example, supply funding sanctions or incentives for health care providers, and/or demand-side measures that give more power to consumers;
  4. meta-regulation: involving an external regulatory body to ensure that health care providers implement safety and quality practices and programmes;
  5. command and control mechanisms : involving enforcement by government

See also

References

  1. ↑ Definition of Health Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization
  2. ↑ Hall, Mark; Bobinski, Mary; Orentlicher, David (2013). Medical Liability and Treatment Relationships Third Edition. MD: Wolters Kluwer.
  3. ↑

Further reading