Health Law and Policy Commons^™

The Ethical Dilemma Of Social Media, Janet H. Southerland

New Orleans Dental Association News

Social media has transformed dentistry, enhancing communication, education, and patient engagement. However, ethical challenges, including privacy concerns and misinformation, pose risks. This article explores the benefits and challenges of social media in dentistry, emphasizing the need for ethical guidelines to uphold professional standards while leveraging digital advancements for improved care and education.

Dentistry And The Law: How To Handle Visits Or Contacts By An Ice Agent, Daniel Schulte J.D.

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

The article addresses how dental practices should handle visits from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents following the January 2025 revocation of the "sensitive locations" policy. While ICE agents can enter public areas without warrants, they require judicial warrants, administrative warrants, or subpoenas to access private areas. Practices should verify agents' identities, follow established law enforcement policies, and protect patient information under HIPAA guidelines. The article recommends developing comprehensive policies and training staff to handle law enforcement visits appropriately.

J Mich Dent Assoc March 2025

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

Each month, The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association provides news, information, and features about Michigan dentistry to our state's oral health community and the MDA's 6,200+ members. It stands as the primary publication reaching Michigan dentists. This month’s issue offers an insightful article on general-purpose AI to boost creativity and efficiency in dental practice. Helpful tips on protecting your reputation are provided in an article on Myths, Tips, and Tricks to manage online reviews. Readers then learn that ADA Commons provides much more than access to current and past articles and issues of the Journal of the Michigan Dental …

Online Reviews: Myths, Tips, And Tricks, Anish Gupta D.D.S.

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

Online reviews are a source of reputation marketing which are valuable to the practice of dentistry. Reviews bring patients in and provide social proof for your practice. We discuss what makes a good review, tips to get reviews, and dispel certain myths regarding online reviews.

Build Your Practice With Dental Revenue Cycle Management, Robert Mcdermott

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

This article explores the essential role of Dental Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) in ensuring the financial success and sustainability of a dental practice. Many dentists, especially those new to solo practice, struggle with managing the business side of dentistry, particularly the complexities of RCM. The article outlines the key steps of RCM, including patient scheduling, insurance verification, claims submission, and payment processing, emphasizing how a well-managed system ensures steady cash flow and enhances patient experience. Key challenges in RCM include lack of formal business training, evolving insurance regulations, and the risk of delayed reimbursements, which can threaten a practice’s viability. …

Strengthening Legal Frameworks And Patient Safety: A Narrative Review Of Medical And Dental Malpractice In Indonesia, Ghulam Mustafa, Ede Surya Darmawan

Jurnal ARSI : Administrasi Rumah Sakit Indonesia

Many cases of medical and dental malpractice in Indonesia are still related to patient safety and healthcare quality. This narrative review aims to identify solutions that can be implemented. The main focus is to compare the incidence of malpractice in clinical medical and dental practice, emphasizing legal implications, coverage, and internal organizational issues. A systematic literature search was conducted through databases such as Pubmed, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, Springer, Garuda, and other online databases. Articles published no later than 2024. Eleven studies were selected that discussed the problem of malpractice in Indonesia. Independent screening and critical appraisal were carried out to …

February 5, 2025 — Letter To The House Ways And Means Committee On Tax, American Dental Association

Advocacy in Action letters

No abstract provided.

Dentistry And The Law: What You Should Know About Collecting Past-Due Accounts, Daniel Schulte J.D.

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

Michigan law regulates debt collection practices for dental offices collecting past-due accounts. While practices can collect their own debts, they must follow specific restrictions regarding workplace communications. The law prohibits harassment, deceptive practices, and sharing debt information with employers or coworkers. Contact at workplaces must be discreet, civil, and cease if the patient expresses inconvenience. Communications are restricted between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. without permission.

J Mich Dent Assoc February 2025

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

Each month, the Journal of the Michigan Dental Association provides news, information, and features about Michigan dentistry to our state's oral health community and the MDA's 6,200+ members. It is the primary publication reaching Michigan dentists. The February issue sets the tone for the MDA’s Annual Meeting, Revving Up Dentistry, this April in Detroit.

A detailed Annual Session Preview is included within the Journal with course listings and activities planned for the four-day event. Regular Departments: News You Need, New Dentist Column, MDA Insurance, Dentistry and the Law, Staff Matters, MDA at your Service, Governmental Affairs, and a Michigan Dental …

A Half Century Of Criminalizing Serious Mental Illness: Observations And Considerations, Arthur J. Lurigio

DePaul Journal of Health Care Law

This article describes the difficulties of working with people with serious mental illnesses (PSMIs) at every stage of the criminal justice process—from arrest to post- incarceration release from prison. The needs of PSMI for mental health and social services are complex and require different case management plans and strategies at various points in the process. Severe mental illnesses (SMIs), such as schizophrenia, major depression, and bipolar disorder, stem from abnormalities in the brain structure and neuroprocessing that cause significant distress and dysfunction. People with serious mental illnesses typically suffer from a variety of other related problems (e.g., addiction) that can …

Mental Health Courts: Is There Any Hope For Mental Illness In An Outdated Criminal Justice System?, Brock Imel

DePaul Journal of Health Care Law

Mental health awareness is an ever-growing field of study that has garnered more attention in America after the COVID-19 pandemic. As far back as colonial America, mental illness was considered taboo in society and often reprimanded with punishable crimes. This article seeks to divulge into the history of mental health and its relation to the law, as well as how the creation of mental health courts has led to a decrease in recidivism.

This article aims to provide the reader with an understanding of the evolving field of mental health courts and provide state legislatures foundational knowledge for creating and …

Decriminalizing Disease: A Health Justice Approach To Infectious Diseases And Criminal Law, Sean E. Bland

Arkansas Law Review

Infectious diseases, also called communicable diseases, are largely a public health issue and should not be criminalized. This Article seeks to re-frame the discussion around the legal framework for infectious diseases in a way that moves beyond a punishment mindset and toward a health justice mindset. The focus in this Article is on health justice rather than traditional understandings of public health, defined as the science and practice of improving the health of people and their communities. The Article makes three novel contributions. First, it applies a health justice framework to the critique of infectious disease criminalization. Second, the Article …

The Healing Power Of Antitrust, Theodosia Stavroulaki

Northwestern University Law Review

Millions of Americans live in hospital deserts—communities where people lack geographic access to hospitals and primary care physicians. People living in these deserts often miss doctor appointments, delay necessary care, and stop adhering to their treatment. In this way, hospital deserts exacerbate the health disparities plaguing America. This Article demonstrates that hospital deserts are not inevitable but the result of several business strategies—including noncompete agreements and merging with competitors—and antitrust enforcers’ unwillingness to recognize these harmful practices as antitrust violations. To cure the issue of hospital deserts, this Article makes three proposals. First, antitrust enforcers and the courts should expand …

January 15, 2025 — Welcome Letter To Members Of The 119th Congress, American Dental Association

Advocacy in Action letters

No abstract provided.

Transformative Experiences, Anticipatory Regret, And Informed Consent, Elizabeth Lanphier, Shannon Fyfe

Scholarly Articles

Regret risk is not consistently part of information sharing within informed consent. Yet two kinds of decisions that often invoke concerns about future regret, abortion and sterilization, raise considerations for the role of regret in clinical decision-making and informed consent, particularly regarding decisions about potentially transformative experiences. We distinguish between first-personal and second-personal anticipatory regret and argue that first-personal anticipatory regret can play a productive role, but second-personal anticipatory regret can function in ways that are pernicious. Introducing second-personal anticipatory regret into medical informed consent processes is, we argue, not only not required for informed medical decision-making, but impermissible within …

Consequences Of Artificial Intelligence In Health Insurance: Lawsuits, Policy, And Ethics, Alyssa N. Roberts

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In recent years, the healthcare system has been burdened by a multitude of obstacles that hinder the ability to provide effective, affordable, and timely care. Among these, one of the most significant challenges is the role that health insurance plays in shaping the quality of care. Health insurance companies are designed to decrease financial strain on patients, but they have introduced inefficiencies through delayed coverage approvals, increased denials, and administrative costs. Artificial intelligence (AI) has started to play an integral role in resolving these issues for the health insurance industry. Through its quick automated claim processing, fraud screening, and reduced …

Medication Abortion And The Mails: The Ghost Of Anthony Comstock Rides Again?, Lars Noah

UF Law Faculty Publications

Mail-order dispensing of the prescription drug mifepristone has become the latest flashpoint in this country’s long-running debate over abortion access. It also has brought back from the dead one of the oldest federal statutes to address that contentious subject. In their fight to limit access to a drug approved by the FDA one quarter of a century ago, abortion opponents have rediscovered the Comstock Act. Although amended on several occasions since 1873, Congress never managed to repeal or clarify its ambiguous language relating to abortion. On its narrowest reading, this provision would have no impact whatsoever on access to mifepristone; …

The Chemical Straightjacket: Institutional Over-Use Of Psychotropic Drugs On Children In Lieu Of Therapeutic Community Mental Health Services, Marisa Leib-Neri

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

This Article argues that the abysmal state of children’s mental health in America is in part due to an overreliance on and over prescription of psychotropic drugs inside psychiatric residential institutions in lieu of community based mental health services. This overreliance on residential institutions and psychotropic drugs has allowed a new form of chemical restraint to flourish—the chemical straitjacket. This Article uses the medication lists of twelve children in seven different North Carolina psychiatric residential treatment facilities to demonstrate how the chemical straitjacket operates: the prescription of drugs not approved for pediatric populations, counter to evidence-based practices for particular diagnoses, …

Environment Scan Of Generative Ai Infrastructure For Clinical And Translational Science, Hua Xu, Jiang Bian, Chunhua Weng, Yifan Peng, Betina Idnay, Zihan Xu, William G. Adams, Mohammad Adibuzzaman, Nicholas R. Anderson, Neil Bahroos, Douglas S. Bell, Cody Bumgardner, Thomas Campion, Mario Castro, James J. Cimino, I. Glenn Cohen, David Dorr, Peter L. Elkin, Jungwei W. Fan, Todd Ferris, David J. Foran, David Hanauer, Mike Hogarth, Kun Huang, Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer, Manoj Kandpal, Niranjan S. Karnik, Avnish Katoch, Albert M. Lai, Christophe G. Lambert, Lang Li, Christopher Lindsell, Jinze Liu, Zhiyong Lu, Yuan Luo, Peter Mcgarvey, Eneida A. Mendonca, Parsa Mirhaji, Shawn Murphy, John D. Osborne, Ioannis C. Paschalidis, Paul A. Harris, Fred Prior, Nicholas J. Shaheen, Nawar Shara, Ida Sim, Umberto Tachinardi, Lemuel R. Waitman, Rosalind J. Wright, Adrian H. Zai, Kai Zheng, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Bradley A. Malin, Karthik Natarajan, Nicholson Price, Rui Zhang, Yiye Zhang

Articles

This study reports a comprehensive environmental scan of the generative AI (GenAI) infrastructure in the national network for clinical and translational science across 36 institutions supported by the CTSA Program led by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at the United States. Key findings indicate a diverse range of institutional strategies, with most organizations in the experimental phase of GenAI deployment. The results underscore the need for a more coordinated approach to GenAI governance, emphasizing collaboration among senior leaders, clinicians, information technology staff, and researchers. Our analysis reveals that 53% of …

Federalism, State Action, And Workers’ Medical Privacy, Ani B. Satz

Faculty Articles

Injured workers entering state workers’ compensation systems effectively forego their medical privacy. This is due to widespread judicial misinterpretation of the HIPAA Privacy Rule (HPR) as excluding injured workers from federal medical privacy protections. As a result, medical privacy for workers’ compensation claims is effectively governed by state law. This Article argues that states have failed to protect the medical privacy of injured workers adequately and that there is a pressing need for legislative reform. The Article presents the first comprehensive survey in the legal literature of state action protecting the medical privacy of injured workers. Part I describes the …

Defederalizing Opioid Addiction Care, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

Lack of access to evidence-based care for drug addiction is an urgent problem amid a decades-long overdose crisis that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. Opioid addiction is the primary driver of overdoses today, and medicines exist to treat such addiction that can dramatically improve quality of life while reducing the risk of deadly overdose by more than half. Yet fewer than one in four of the nine million Americans who need such evidence-based medical care for their addiction receive it. Chief among barriers to access are restrictive and burdensome federal requirements limiting the use of narcotic medications …

The European Health Data Space As A Compass For Academic/Industry Collaborations, Gabriela Lenarczyk, Hannah Louise Smith, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Articles

Against the backdrop of a deepening funding crisis for academic research in the US, how and when can closer relationships between academia and industry better support the research enterprise? Spector-Bagdady (2025) explores this potential response, bringing insight from genetic data sharing between academia and industry—and the benefits and challenges that arise from that sharing. She calls for a response that aligns academic institutional policy to support the realization of any public good, recognizing the pitfalls and problematic incentives that shape individual responses. It’s a timely call, and an attractive one in a time of urgent uncertainty about funding and support. …

Characteristics Of Accountable Care Organizations Offering Methadone To Patients With Opioid Use Disorder, Maia Crawford, Benjamin A. Barsky, Haiden A. Huskamp, Mary F. Brunette, Ellen Meara

Faculty Scholarship

Understanding whether organizations with Medicare and Medicaid accountable care organization (ACO) contracts offer methadone provides important context about how organizations invested in payment and delivery system reform address the needs of patients with substance use disorders. We used data from the 2021-2022 National Survey of Accountable Care Organizations to assess whether organizations with ACO contracts, which are held accountable for the cost and quality of care for an assigned patient population, offered methadone to patients with opioid use disorder (OUD), and the organizational and contextual characteristics associated with doing so. We found that 28.3% of survey respondents reported that clinicians …

Pharmaceutical-Telehealth Confederacies, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

Access to prescription pharmaceuticals has historically been controlled by a physician’s pen. As a result, pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars on advertising and promotion to mitigate this barrier: first and primarily, to physicians and other prescribers, and more recently, to the general public through direct-to-consumer advertising. The success of these promotional efforts can be seen in greater prescribing of costly brand-name medicines, even in settings where lower-priced generic alternatives exist. Brand-name prescriptions now make up only 10% of all prescriptions written yet account for 87% of drug spending. Despite these substantial returns on investment, companies continue to seek opportunities …

Dentistry And The Law: The Difference Between ‘Non-Covered’ Vs. ‘Disallowed’ Services, Daniel Schulte Jd

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

The article clarifies the distinction between "non-covered" and "disallowed" services in dental plan audits. Non-covered services are not included in the patient’s dental plan, often due to plan limitations, while disallowed services are covered but deemed non-payable due to issues like claim deficiencies or lack of documentation. Dentists must review their contracts to understand obligations regarding non-covered services and ensure compliance with HIPAA for patient-paid services. For disallowed services, contesting decisions may be possible depending on the agreement with the dental plan.

J Mich Dent Assoc January 2025

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

Each month, the Journal of the Michigan Dental Association provides news, information, and features about Michigan dentistry to our state's oral health community and the MDA's 6,200+ members. It is the primary publication reaching Michigan dentists. The January issue sets the tone for February, the observance of Children’s Dental Health Month.

Michigan Academy of Pediatric Dentistry President Jessica Bentoski welcomes readers to this special issue, which features a cover feature on “Approaches to Care for Children with Special Needs in Dental Settings: Desensitization and Teledentistry” and a supporting article on “General Dentists’ Education, Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behavior Concerning the Effects …

Cause Of Death? -- It's Probably Not What's Reported On The Death Certificate, Lauren R. Roth

Lewis & Clark Law Review

In the age of big data, this country has a data problem—inaccurate and incomplete information in death certificates. The problem has long been hidden by the numbers reported—as have the people whose deaths go uncounted, but the COVID-19 pandemic unveiled the scope of the issue. Since the beginning of the pandemic, “excess deaths” (i.e., any deaths above the number predicted by existing mortality models) have increased significantly. Most of these excess deaths are likely attributable to COVID-19 because the decedent was never tested for COVID-19 or it was one of multiple factors contributing to their death. Other deaths are uncounted …

Dirty Water, Breanna Booker, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

Plastics are taking over. Every day, humans are exposed to plastic pollutants in a variety of ways. From the water we use to water crops in the field, to the water in our taps, to the liquids we drink from plastic containers, it can be found virtually anywhere you look. Not only is it everywhere in the environment, but it is also within us. It builds up in our bodies. Plastics have become a major public health concern; researchers estimate that the total healthcare cost related to plastic chemicals may be as much as $250 billion.[1]

Water has always …

Maternal Mortality According To State Abortion Legislative Climate Following The Us Supreme Court's Dobbs V. Jackson Women's Health Organization Ruling, Emily Nuss, Mari Iwasaki, Lindsay Robbins, Peggy Ye, Misa Hayasaka, George Saade, Tetsuya Kawakita

Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology Faculty Publications

Objective

We aimed to evaluate how maternal mortality rates have evolved across US states following the Dobbs ruling, while accounting for the confounding influence of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Study Design

We conducted a retrospective analysis of publicly available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wide-ranging ONline Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC WONDER) database from January 2018 to December 2024. This study period was divided into three intervals: (1) pre-COVID (January 2018 to February 2020), (2) pandemic (March 2020 to September 2022), and (3) post-Dobbs (October 2022 to December 2024). Using the Kaiser Family Foundation …

Assessment Of Implementation And Enforcement Of Smoke-Free Laws And Policies Among Malaysian Smokers: A Mixed Method Approach, Gan Shiz Yee

Student Works (2020-2029)

Smokefree laws (SFL) and policies could deter smoking by strengthening anti-smoking norms, impacting cessation behaviour due to decreased social acceptability of smoking in public spaces. With socioeconomic status (SES) affecting smoking risk factors, disparities in health outcomes post-SFL implementation are likely. Furthermore, regional and international assessments show Malaysia’s poor performance due to ineffective smoking bans and enforcement. Local studies revealed inadequate SFL implementation and enforcement, leading to high secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure. Understanding these challenges and opportunities is crucial for improving policy implementation and enforcement to enhance public health outcomes. This study examined the association between SFL and quit intention …