Compliance and risk
Every Direct Practice Care member has access to HR legal support. In-house counsel who work through the employment issues practices actually run into.
This is employment law support: you as an employer, and the people you employ. It is how a practice reduces the risk that comes with running a business without a full HR department behind it.
It is not clinical, and it is not advice about how you practice. Anything touching patient care or protected health information stays with your own counsel and your own compliance program, where it belongs.
Compliance is not one project. It is a standing set of obligations, and most of them change without telling you.
Overtime is calculated under the Fair Labor Standards Act, alongside minimum wage for hourly staff and rules covering hours, breaks, and compensation plans. The Department of Labor enforces roughly 180 job-protection laws, from pay requirements to termination notice and parental leave.
An anti-harassment policy has to exist, reach every new and existing employee, and be backed by manager training so a complaint gets a fair, impartial, thorough investigation. Several states, including California and New York, now require prevention training outright.
Your HR files hold tax and Social Security numbers, addresses, and employment contracts. That data has to be protected, and the balance between transparency and confidentiality gets genuinely hard during a workplace investigation.
Employment practices have to comply with anti-discrimination law covering gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, marital and family status, disability, and veteran status. Employees also have to be told their rights under EEOC law, and that raising a complaint will not cost them their standing.
Compensation, leave, sick pay, retirement, and overtime all have to line up with federal employment law, and with what the employment agreement actually says.
A safe environment, adequate training, documented incidents, and regular risk assessment. In a clinical setting the exposure is real and the documentation is what protects you.
Under the FLSA, records have to show when employees start and stop work and how many hours they log each day and week. State law often adds requirements on top of that.
The compliance work runs continuously and records itself as it goes — FLSA, OSHA, ADA, ACA, and EEOC, plus I-9 filing and E-Verify, wage-and-hour audit assistance, unemployment claims administration, and employment practices liability insurance.
That is the difference between having a policy and being able to show you followed it.
Questions practices ask
More on the questions page.
Thirty minutes, no slide deck. Bring your headcount and whatever is costing your practice the most time.