Being a medical practitioner and helping people as a career choice is as noble as things get. Devoting all of your life to helping patients, healing them, and aiding them during their tough times is one of the most difficult life callings, which is exactly why it needs to be done the right way. If you do not, you are putting at risk not only your career and reputation, but the lives of people who have entrusted their well-being to you and your team. Many a doctor has had their medical license revoked and for many reasons. If you want to continue being a successful and respectable physician and remain working in your field for decades, there must be conscious effort to make sure you avoid losing your medical license.
In this article right here and now we are talking about how you can make sure that you always keep your license. Being officially allowed to use your knowledge and skills in the medical field to help others is the only way you can do it. Therefore, you should know about the most important legal ways that will help you avoid losing your medical license. Keep on reading to learn more about this, both if you have never had to deal with any of this and if you are currently at risk of facing legal trouble with your medical license. If the latter is the case, you may also need help from the right legal expert, and in this case those would be a medical physician professional license defense attorney. Check out brownlawga.com for one of the best such professionals out there.
Renew It On Time
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Arguably the worst and the most preventable way in which a physician can lose their medical license is not renewing it on time. This is entirely up to the medical worker and all the fault falls on them. It can even be considered as negligence and disrespect shown for the profession and the field. Depending on the place where you live and work, there could be different timeframes to do so. Most often, the officials require physicians to renew their license every two years. Failure to do so after 90 days of the available deadline results in fees and penalties. If a medical practitioner fails to renew it after five years, the license is cancelled entirely and the physician has to apply for a new one just like they did the first time around. This involves demonstrating their skills and showing that their knowledge is up to date. Practicing medicine with an expired license can cause you a world of trouble of the legal sort because it may be viewed as a felony or a misdemeanor. The penalties include steep fines as well as jail time. Keep renewing it on time and there will be nothing to worry about.
Avoid Insurance Fraud
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Here is another common reason why many medical practitioners lose their medical license and end up in legal trouble. Insurance fraud is however not always the physician’s fault entirely. It can happen due to oversight in many stages, but it is usually the medical practitioner who ends up suffering the most. Taking appropriate steps to ensure this does not happen is vital and it can prevent or mitigate potential insurance frauds from occurring. For example, standard billing codes protect the practitioners against allegations of insurance frauds. To remain protected, make sure you have all the billing codes verified. They should depict what was done and when. Apart from this, keeping track of all of the medical records to be used for audits is another crucial way to prevent yourself and your practice from medical insurance frauds.
Drug and Prescription Violations
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If a medical practitioner is to take advantage and misuse their position for their own gain or to help someone else, it most often happens in the form of prescribing medication. Holding a medical license grants the medical practitioner the ability to prescribe medication to others, and many healthcare professionals have been caught mistreating this power that they have. It is a great responsibility and using it for anything other than helping patients the right way may result in a lost license. A physician must never prescribe anything other than what is necessary medication and they must be very cautious with controlled drugs and opioids. A lot of medication that can be misused has both quantity and time and manner regulations, which means that they are only issued to the patients in special situations where there can be nothing else that can help. Every representative of the medical and healthcare fields has to be aware of what may be perceived as a drug violation because the consequence of one is almost always the loss of the medical license.
Showing Negligence
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Negligent behavior and obviously showing little to no respect or care for the patients and their issues is a one-way ticket to having your license revoked. Every physician is expected to provide and show care up to a certain standard and be equal to every single one of their patients. Negligence in the medical and healthcare sense is defined as failure to act with enough or proper care or caution that professionals would otherwise use in such a situation. Most common type of negligence involves failures to take precautions, with gross negligence going as far as showing extreme disregard for the safety, well-being, and even lives of the patients. Human error may be behind negligence, but also sloppiness and oversight. Consequences of such actions, or lack thereof, can be severe and worse than the original health issue the patient came to the physician with. It is therefore an obvious punishment and result for the license to be taken away. Patient abuse and unethical behavior can both be their own set or problems and be viewed as negligence. Violating the trust that the patients and their families put on the healthcare professional is more than enough for them to not only lose the license, but face legal charges too. Any form of abuse, from physical and verbal to sexual and mental is enough grounds for the ultimate loss of a medical license.
