Healthcare

Healthcare is the second-largest private employer sector in Connecticut, and the firm's healthcare practice has grown over the last fifteen years into a durable piece of the docket. The work breaks into four areas: Department of Public Health regulatory matters, HIPAA and data-privacy compliance, physician-group transactions, and the employment-law issues that sit underneath every hospital and ancillary provider.

DPH regulatory work includes licensure, Certificate of Need applications, and compliance matters under Connecticut's public-health and facility-licensing statutes. Connecticut's Certificate of Need regime remains more active than most states'; the Office of Health Strategy has jurisdiction over hospital acquisitions, outpatient-surgical-facility transfers, and large capital expenditures, and the approval process often runs in parallel with deal negotiations. We coordinate the regulatory filings with the transactional workstream so that closing and CON approval land together.

HIPAA, HITECH, and Connecticut's own health-data statutes govern day-to-day operations. The Connecticut Data Privacy Act (effective July 2023) layered an additional compliance regime onto healthcare entities that process data outside the HIPAA-covered perimeter — patient-marketing analytics, wellness programs, employee health information. Jasmine Pendleton handles the privacy-law overlay for the firm's healthcare clients, including business-associate agreement negotiations with vendors and response to security incidents.

Physician-group transactions — practice sales to hospital systems, partner buy-ins, ancillary-service joint ventures — run through Managing Partner Steven Stone and the Corporate group. Connecticut's corporate practice of medicine rules, physician-owned ancillary-service restrictions, and Stark/Anti-Kickback overlay shape how these deals are structured, and the group has closed enough to know the patterns.

On the employment side, Norman Cavanaugh represents Connecticut hospitals, physician practices, and long-term-care providers on discrimination defense, wage-and-hour compliance, medical-staff-peer-review-privilege matters, and union organizing in the long-term-care sector. Product liability defense counsel Roxanne Patterson has handled medical-device and pharmaceutical product-defense matters for the firm's insurance-carrier and manufacturer clients. Tax chair Flannery O'Neill advises on the tax-exempt hospital and foundation work that often overlaps with the nonprofit practice.