March 18, 2019

To RPC’s clients and friends:

           A belated “thank you” for RPC’s success in 2018. Our practice grew in all our service lines. This growth came from repeat business with existing clients and many new clients. We added consultants and support staff to handle the increased workload while maintaining the quality of our work. We also grew our panel of consulting physicians and neuropsychologists. Here are some of RPC’s notable accomplishments in 2018:

Personal Injury Litigation

  • RPC worked on 235 personal injury cases providing a combination of life care plans, vocational assessments and loss of earning capacity reports on each. We welcomed 69 new law firms as clients. While most of our cases were in Texas, we worked on personal injury cases in Nevada, Alaska, and Washington State.
  • We maintained our balance of work for plaintiff and defense. Our balanced and consistent approach to damages calculations adds to the credibility of our reports and testimony. We hope that credibility aids parties in reaching equitable settlements in more cases.
  • We assisted counsel in personal injury cases against nursing homes to identify understaffing and the draining of nursing home assets by related party transactions.
  • Our forensic accountant, Valerie Gray, CPA calculated damages in cases where the injured party owned a business or professional practice. Valerie joined RPC in April 2018. She is certified as a business valuation analyst, fraud examiner, and forensic accountant.
  • We added a life care planner, Anne Rauch, RN, CLCP, a vocational consultant, Hiral Patel, MHS, CRC, and a nurse consultant, Erin Cleveland, RN, to the staff to handle the increased case volume. We also added Roy Bourne as our Litigation Practice Manager.

Healthcare Litigation

  • RPC worked on 36 health care litigation cases. We provided this service for plaintiff and defense attorneys representing health plan, health care providers, patients and relators. These cases were in Texas, New Mexico, Washington, and Florida. We welcomed 14 law firms as new clients.
  • We helped write discovery requests and analyzed resulting large data files to identify false claims and calculate damages in a major qui tam
  • We calculated business interruption damages in cases where a construction contractor caused fire or water damage to a hospital. In doing so we applied our knowledge of hospital operations and finances.
  • We worked with counsel for health plans and health care providers in Texas and Florida to establish the amounts owed out-of-network providers of hospital, physician and air ambulance services.
  • We helped a state workers’ compensation agency analyze the effect of a potential change in the hospital fee schedule on payments to hospitals.
  • We prepared Section 18.001 counter affidavits on reasonableness of charges in Texas personal injury cases. We successfully resisted motions to strike RPC non-physician staff. With the recent Tyler Court of Appeals order, we hope these motions will be fewer in 2019.
  • We assisted plaintiff attorneys in resolving medical liens. RPC filed amicus briefs with the Texas Supreme Court in the North Cypress case to support discovery to establish reasonable value of services.

Certificate of Need

  • RPC continued its national CON practice launched in 1980. We worked on 12 applications or administrative appeals in 2018. Our clients included publicly traded health care providers, a large non-profit health system, a continuing care retirement community, and single-specialty physician practices.
  • RPC worked on matters in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, District of Columbia. We worked on matters involving hospices, ambulatory surgery centers, acute care hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, obstetric services, skilled nursing facilities, freestanding emergency departments, dialysis centers and home health agencies.
  • RPC added a CON consultant, Rachel Short, MPH, to increase our capacity and made Darcy Schaeffer the Regulatory Practice Manager to coordinate the increased number of cases.

           As President of RPC, I am committed to making sure RPC delivers to clients reports that are relevant, accurate, reliable and timely. We thank our clients for the opportunity to assist and will do our best to justify your continuing confidence.

Sincerely,

Ron Luke, JD, PhD
President

 

Physical Address: 6300 La Calma Drive, Suite 170 • Austin, Texas 78752
Mailing Address: P.O. Box 14464 • Austin, Texas 78761
Phone: 512-371-8000 • Fax: 512-371-8001
www.rpcconsulting.com