New York Department of Health (DOH) regulations provide that an adult home may not admit additional residents with serious mental illness if it has a capacity of 80 or more beds and its resident population is over 25% persons with serious mental illness. In Oceanview Home for Adults, Inc. v. Zucker, the New York Court of Appeals held that these regulations do not facially discriminate against persons with disabilities.
In 1999, the United State Supreme Court held that the Americans with Disabilities Act imposes an affirmative obligation on states to prevent the segregation of persons with disabilities in institutionalized settings that are more restrictive than appropriate for their needs. In October of 2012, New York’s Office of Mental Health (OMH) issued two Clinical Advisories stating that certain large adult homes provided housing experiences for persons with serious mental illness that were not clinically appropriate to their needs and were not conducive to their rehabilitation or recovery. Shortly thereafter, DOH issued the challenged regulations. Continue Reading New York Court of Appeals Upholds Adult Home Admission Regulations
In continuing efforts to address problems exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, on June 18, 2021, the Governor signed legislation (S.1168-A/A.108-B) into law to address an urgent public policy priority related to clinical staffing in hospitals licensed pursuant to Article 28 of the New York State Public Health Law. This legislation requires the establishment of clinical staffing committees to create plans to more effectively distribute staff throughout general hospitals. The staffing committees must consist of at least fifty percent (50%) of registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, and ancillary staff providing direct patient care, and up to fifty percent (50%) of hospital administrators, including, but not limited to, the chief financial officer, the chief nursing officer, and patient care unit directors or managers or their designees. The staffing committees shall create staffing plans with guidelines as to how many patients are assigned to each nurse, as well as how each unit is staffed with ancillary staff, based on patient needs and ratios, matrices or grids, which shall be used as the primary component of the general hospital staffing budget, provided that such staffing plans meet or exceed the terms of existing collective bargaining agreements.
In recent months, there has been a lot of attention on decisions made during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York State in regard to nursing homes. Some of that attention has focused on an order issued in the early days of the pandemic requiring nursing homes to readmit COVID-positive residents previously referred
Home health care aides working twenty-four hour shifts can be paid for as little as thirteen hours under certain conditions, according to a March ruling from the New York Court of Appeals in 
Section 351 of the Bankruptcy Code permits a health care business in bankruptcy to dispose of patient records if it lacks sufficient funds to pay to store the records in accord with applicable state or federal law. Although section 351 was enacted in 2005, the provision appears to be little used. That’s because the procedures
Since the advent of the Medicaid managed care program there has been a lingering question as to when a Medicaid dollar stopped being a Medicaid dollar.
In federal criminal investigations, corporate health care providers have faced a Department of Justice increasingly focused on individuals, one that has limited or foreclosed cooperation credit for corporations not providing complete information on all individual involvement. At a conference in late November, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein outlined a 
Last week, in 