Published September 2004

Prescribing regulation remedies
From Medicare to HIPAA, Mill Creek firm specializes in health law

Snohomish County Business Journal/ KIMBERLY HILDEN After years of working in the health-law department of a Bellevue law firm, Stephen Rose founded Rose Health Law Group in 2002.

By Kimberly Hilden
SCBJ Assistant Editor

In today’s health-care industry, keeping up with governmental regulations is not unlike a dish-spinning act straight out of vaudeville.

By the time a health-care provider is up to speed on one rule, it seems another piece of legislation has been passed — at the state or federal level — to address issues of third-party reimbursement, patient privacy and billing fraud.

And that’s in addition to regulations pertaining to basic business operation, such as employee, tax and corporate law.

According to one Mill Creek attorney, the industry is one of the most regulated in the country, and one that isn’t likely to see a letup anytime soon.

“When you look at the dollars the government is spending on health care, it’s better than 10 percent of the (gross national product) and growing. That kind of money draws the eyes of the legislature,” said Stephen Rose, a longtime health-law attorney who left a Bellevue firm two years ago to start Rose Health Law Group.

The practice, which specializes exclusively in health law, works with health-care providers to develop and implement corporate compliance plans that address Medicare and Medicaid billing procedures as well as take into account the privacy and administrative aspects of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA.

The law, which includes rules for patient privacy and information security, also has requirements for transaction and code set standards, creating a common language within health care for sending electronic data.

“HIPAA presents a major shift in how health-care providers handle records,” said Rose, whose firm was hired by the Washington State Medical Association to present the legal side of the new law to members at 25 seminars throughout the state.

Along with issues of compliance, Rose and colleagues Dawn Kreysar and Jennifer Odza have developed the firm’s Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement practice as well as an expertise in defending clients against charges of fraud and abuse.

Clients of Rose Health Law Group range from hospitals and physicians to nursing facilities and mental health centers. About 35 percent of the firm’s clients are located in Washington state, with 65 percent in Alaska.

Most have come via referral or have attended one of the firm’s legal lectures, said Rose. A half dozen have actually sought him out while he was in court.

“I was arguing a case for Cordova Community Hospital, and the CFO of Alaska Regional heard I’d been working the case and wanted to hire me,” he recalled of one such instance.

For Rose, working with health-care providers comes naturally. Both of his parents were hospital administrators, as were two of his uncles and his sister.

“All of my early (teen-age) jobs were working in a hospital, from dishwasher to janitor and gardener,” he said. “As I got older, I moved more into the business side of things.”

Both he and Odza also have worked in the health-care field on an administrative level, he as a clinic manager for a medical center in Southern California and she as the administrative coordinator for clinical administration at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

That experience has given the firm a solid understanding of a health-care institution’s structure and function, so that a client’s time isn’t wasted answering questions about how a certain process works, Rose said. “You talk the same language.”

“Often, when someone goes into a hospital, it’s as a patient or someone visiting a patient,” he said. “We go into a facility with the understanding that this is also a place of business.”

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