Fulfilling Careers in Health Law You Can Research Right Now

If you’ve ever had a passion for both the healthcare field and law and didn’t know how to choose, you’re in luck! You don’t have to. Health Law is a subset of both the legal and medical fields and marries medical knowledge with legal acumen to help people and health institutions!

There are numerous career opportunities from personal injury lawyers, to hospital/institutional legal counsel, to college professors wide open to people with knowledge of medicine and law. In this video I’ll talk about a few.

I’m talking to you today about careers in health law. We’re talking about a person that has a health care background or is seeking one, but who may already be a lawyer. Or conversely, a person who is a healthcare professional seeking to be an attorney at some point. Or possibly a person who, like me, already has both a medical and legal education.

So what are some careers that you can consider in health law? That you can look up right now and if your interest is start to go that way. No one spoke with me about health law when I came out of law school back in the early 90s. No one said anything about it because I don’t know it to be an area of law that was well defined.

There were areas like medical malpractice and personal injury where you could well use your health care background to really help in those areas. Also, there’s always been things in insurance that you could do that are very helpful because of your healthcare background.

In fact, when I became an assistant city attorney it was because I was a nurse and an attorney that I was asked to come. There were many medical records that needed to be looked at. There were doctors’ depositions that needed to be taken and more things in discovery on these cases that needed to be in place to determine whether or not the value was there or if it was worth settling.

Was there a real injury and if there was what was the value of that injury? My healthcare background is something that really came into play with doing doctors depositions, reading those records, and understanding what questions to ask. I was in a good place because of my background.

There are many other areas now that weren’t in place before. Now they have an area called health law. In those firms or in that area they do all sorts of things in hospitals or for hospitals. They also do the acquisitions and mergers.

By that I mean doctors getting space in a building and making sure everything’s in place. You’re talking about contracts and real estate and all of those areas that have their own specialties coming together.

There’s so much more you can do within those areas because you understand healthcare as an attorney. Look up health law. You can specialize in medical malpractice, personal injury, or insurance defense. You can even do plaintiff work where you go after and sue insurance companies.

Research these things. Research being an in-house attorney at a hospital right now. As a claims attorney you would handle claims against institutions, hospitals, or employees of the hospital such as doctors, nurses, or other health professionals.

For instance, take a case where someone chooses to sue a hospital or hospital employee. Your job as the attorney is to decide whether or not there are damages, try to mitigate those damages, and defend your client in court.

Or, you may be on the plaintiff’s side. You have an injured client and need to defend them against a health professional’s or hospital’s counsel. With a healthcare background you have the unique ability to be able to assess your client’s claim while understanding how to examine medical records and documentation for any errors on the hospital’s part.

You can be creative with it. Remember there are attorneys who don’t have healthcare backgrounds who are doing fine in many areas of health law. The difference is that you can add so much more to it when you have a healthcare background.

You understand so much. You’re so valuable and you need to understand that. People often think that to go into law, they have to go into criminal law. Which is a great area of law, don’t get me wrong, but it takes a special person to handle those cases.

You don’t have to go into criminal law. There are plenty of people who don’t like criminal law and turned away from the entire field because they thought they had to be a criminal attorney. You don’t.

There are all sorts of areas of law, but I just want to talk to you about health law. I want you to understand you can be creative in health law and you can work at a hospital. They have legal risk. You can be an attorney working as a risk manager but you can take it to another level because of your expertise.

As an attorney, you can help the hospital or healthcare facility on another level as well. For instance, you can assist with doctors’ contracts. Hospital contracts have clauses in them that you will uniquely understand with a health care background. You understand how they work and how those clauses really will pan out for that healthcare provider or facility.

With a specialty in both healthcare and law there a lot of opportunities you can consider. If you’re interested, look them up right now and see what’s available. Maybe you’ll find an area that you like and decide to change your career path.

When you have your degrees, you can carve a niche in that area well. You can focus on medical malpractice or personal injury suits such as car crashes or slips and falls. If you’re on the plaintiff side and settling for your client, it helps you because you understand the injury.

You understand how to describe it and what to state. You understand how to take depositions in your litigation and in your discovery leading your way to that trial. Also, you know how to ask and what to ask medical professionals on the stand.

Specializing in health law gives you the ability to defend from a place of understanding and expertise. You understand what doctors and nurses are saying, what they did or didn’t do, and what they should have done. You understand the way facilities are supposed to operate both legally and medically.

Do you have to totally walk away from health care as a health care attorney? If you have a healthcare background? No you don’t. Do you have to be a health care person before you start to get into those areas? No. Health care adds so much more to health care related legal areas.

I just wanted to take time to help you see that. My career so far has been great because of my healthcare background. It’s been what I wanted to be because I don’t want to deviate too far from health care.

Even though I’ve done some things totally not within healthcare. Immigration? Nothing to do with health care. Real estate? I’m a title agent. Nothing to do with health care, but working with immigration has helped me because I’m able to give and help. That’s my personality. I’m a nurse.

Working within real estate has helped me tremendously. If I take it all back to health care, I understand now getting those transactions for the property for the medical facilities. I understand contracts quite well.

All of that has helped me bring it back to health and my healthcare background helps in my legal cases. It’s something you can actually pile on. Law allows you to do a lot of things with what you have.

You learn and you’re creative. You learn how to explore and use all of that knowledge for the betterment of whatever system or whomever you’re trying to help. It works out well.

Health law is awesome. Don’t forget that. What we talked about are just some of the things you can look up right now to do in those areas. It’s a fantastic area of law that is still evolving. If you can use your healthcare background, as well as your legal degree and license, that’s health law. See if it may be right for you.