Health Law

Published November 30, 2016 by Virginia Business

Peter Lipresti

Peter Lipresti PC
Fairfax

Other legal specialties: Business law, mergers & acquisitions, estate planning
Birthplace: New York City
Education: Bachelor’s degree, Phi Beta Kappa, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, N.Y.; law degree and master of law (taxation), Georgetown University Law Center
Spouse: Donna
Children: Katie and Nick
Hobbies or pastimes: Traveling, skiing, racquetball
First job as a lawyer: Office of Chief Counsel, Internal Revenue Service, Washington, D.C.
Fan of: Virginia Tech football
Favorite vacation spot: Italy
Career mentors: Louis H. Diamond, Wayne K. Johnson

Who are your main health law clients and what issues are they dealing with?
My health-care clients are almost exclusively physician practices and physician-owned independent diagnostic centers.  The primary issue facing these clients is how to remain independent in the current health-care environment.  Many have decided that they cannot and have been integrated (i.e., acquired) by the local health systems.  Other clients have banded together in a full merger environment or have partially-integrated with companies that can offer savings from scale, especially with regard to billing and electronic health records.

Has the Affordable Care Act changed the practice of health law?
The ACA has accelerated what was almost inevitable (and good), and that is compensating physicians for keeping patients healthy.  Although we are still very much in a fee-for-services environment, even before the ACA, insurance companies were encouraging Patient-Centered Medical Homes whereby medical practices received “bonus” compensation for having demonstrably good outcomes among their patient population.  For the “new” system to work, practices had to be able to produce the data to prove that their patient population was healthier.  This required the adoption of the more sophisticated EMR (electronic medical records) systems.  These systems are expensive, which then caused individual practices to join larger health systems or to band together to bear the cost.