Kimberly Ruppel, Partner at Dickinson Wright

The Risky Health Care Business

What she does: Kim is a partner at Dickinson Wright in Michigan and Chair of Dickinson Wright’s Healthcare Litigation and Telehealth Task Forces. Kim has over 20 years’ experience as a commercial litigator who represents healthcare providers, insurers and benefit plans in healthcare contract litigations (including enforcing and defending non-compete agreements), licensing and regulatory disputes, governmental fraud and abuse investigations, HIPAA compliance counseling, and insurance claims and coverage disputes.

On risk with noncompetes: "The individual provider doesn't want to be limited from performing his or her clinical services anywhere that they want. But the main objective, I think, from the employer side is to protect intellectual property, patient lists, confidential information, business strategy, and even just depending on the employer if there is any kind of financial investment in the physician with respect to training, or sign on bonus, or payment of continuing ed expenses. So where the employer is putting additional money into and as an investment its employees it wants to protect that investment … There's a decision, a business decision, to be made. Is the hospital going to file a lawsuit and sue its former physician. And then there's legal risk in that, there's financial risk in that, and there's the public relations risk in that. So there's certainly that thinking does come into play when considering the risk of litigation with a noncompete"