A sidebar with … Louis Szura

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It’s been a busy but successful month for Southfield attorney Louis C. Szura.

In late September, he was elected chair of the State Bar of Michigan Health Care Law Section, and he followed that up by competing in his sixth marathon in Chicago.

Szura, of Szura & Delonis PLC, spoke with Michigan Lawyers Weekly to discuss his career and his plans for the section.

What’s been your previous involvement with the section and its leadership team?

I was previously chair of the publications committee. We published multiple white-paper articles each year on emerging issues in health care law and I’ve been a member of the council of the Health Care Law Section for the last few years as well. I’ve also spoken at some of the events and have done presentations.

What kind of work did you do while on the publications committee?

We would meet to discuss the emerging issues that year that were important to all of our members. We have a lot of members who work in-house for hospitals or pharmaceutical groups, so we have a wide background of potential issues.

We would then seek our contributors. We’re lucky because we have a lot of great institutional knowledge and people who are phenomenal at putting together publications. We published several white-paper articles that were fairly academic and tried to address the pressing issues.

What are your goals for being chair of the section over the next year?

Our section is lucky because we have a very high level of participation from people who are doing publications and webinars for the other members, so my first goal is maintaining those high level of resources and education opportunities for our members.

Another goal I have is to keep our members up to date with changes in Lansing and Washington. Health care law is changing constantly. The opioid crisis is always an issue, along with the aging of the baby-boomer generation and Obamacare being a hot-button political issue the last few years, so the only constant really is change in health care law.

Another goal would be to embrace the diversity of views among our members. They have different backgrounds throughout the state. We’re also embracing members who have primary practice areas in other areas of the law but have health care issues that come up, like an estate planning attorney who would want to know more about health care issues.

There are also some emerging issues we’re looking at this year that we want to try to educate our members on or get information to our members about.

Could you elaborate some of those emerging issues?

One of them is going to be this technology disruption in health care. Amazon, Apple, Uber are all getting into it, and blockchain is another technology that has a lot of application to health care apparently. We’ll be advising members on those technology changes and what are the changes going to be to health care information and privacy.

Another area is the opioid legislation. There’s a lot of focus on the opioid crisis and what to do about it and how to respond.

The medical marijuana issue is another one that’s evolving constantly along with the focus on behavioral health funding in Michigan and how any changes in behavioral health are funded and delivered.

A perennial issue is health care fraud and abuse. The metro Detroit area is a focus of fraud, so compliance and education in the health care law community will help to spot health care fraud issues.

What kind of cases are you seeing most commonly in recent months?

There’s been a lot of activity in health care acquisitions with investments in the health care industry or buying health care entities. There’s been activity with respect to position arrangements with hospitals, whether that’s contract or employment arrangements, that’s been one of the things that’s changing a bit over the last few years.

There have also been questions about the growing role of nurses in Michigan, and health care fraud and abuse continues to be a hot topic.