As an experienced health care, corporate and transactional lawyer, Mark Ison recognizes that business success requires both attention to granular details and an appreciation of the larger context in which decisions are made. He brings this perspective to his work serving both health care and non-health care industry clients, providing counsel that combines a business attorney’s practical guidance and strategic vision with an immersive understanding of each client’s operational, financial, and compliance challenges.
Mark’s ability to parse the countless nuances of ever-changing laws and guidance, and his grasp of how they intersect with the day-to-day and long-term realities faced by healthcare providers, facilitates his actionable counsel. He is particularly well-versed in fraud and abuse matters, including under federal laws such as the Stark Law, Anti-Kickback Statute, False Claims Act, Civil Monetary Penalties Law and HIPAA, and analogous state laws governing self-referral, fee-splitting, kickbacks, the corporate practice of medicine, and privacy. His practice also includes substantial work on matters involving Medicare reimbursement and reassignment, including audits, appeals, and disputes, as well as facility and professional licensing, professional entity formation and qualification, prompt payment, and other issues.
Clients across the healthcare spectrum rely on Mark for his compliance expertise and transactional and operational experience, including physicians and physician groups, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, physical therapists, and chiropractors, as well as physician joint ventures, laboratories, pharmacies, independent diagnostic testing facilities, ambulatory surgery centers, and healthcare technology and device companies. He works with clients on a broad range of operational and transactional issues, such as the formation, operation, dissolution, purchase and sale of professional practices and related entities (including complex private equity-backed transactions and physician-hospital integration transactions), employment and recruitment agreements, management agreements, professional services agreements, joint ventures, payor disputes, and covenants not-to-compete.
Not limiting his practice exclusively to health care clients, Mark has represented clients in many other industries in connection with mergers and acquisitions, venture capital and private equity financing, securities matters, business formation and dissolution, and day-to-day operational issues, including leasing and licensing transactions and employment matters.
Mark is an adjunct instructor in health law at the Belmont College of Law and is a frequent speaker on health law topics, notably with respect to fraud and abuse and healthcare mergers and acquisitions.
EDUCATION
- Vanderbilt University Law School, J.D.
- Member, Order of the Coif
- University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Master of Music in Voice
- University of Kentucky, Bachelor of Music in Voice, summa cum laude
BAR ADMISSIONS
- Tennessee
- Best Lawyers in America®, Corporate Law; Healthcare Law; Mergers and Acquisitions Law (2019 – present)
- Morgan Prize for most outstanding student writing published in the Vanderbilt Law Review
- Nashville Business Journal “Best of the Bar,” Healthcare (2017 – 2019)
- Super Lawyers, Health Care, Mergers & Acquisitions, Business & Corporate (2021 – present)
- Presenter, 22nd Annual Health Law Primer, Tennessee Bar Association (October 19, 2022)
- Presenter, 33rd Annual Health Law Forum, Tennessee Bar Association (October 21 – 22, 2021)
- Presenter, “Private Equity Backed Transactions,” 31st Annual Health Law Forum, Tennessee Bar Association (October 17, 2019)
- Panelist, “Whole Health: A Community Approach to Healthcare,” Belmont Health Law Journal Symposium (February 8, 2019)
- Presenter, “Introduction to Fraud and Abuse Laws,” 16th Annual Health Law Primer, Tennessee Bar Association (October 19, 2016)
- Presenter, “Nuts and Bolts of Professional Entities,” Tennessee Business Law Conference (May 15, 2015)
- Presenter/Producer, “A Lawyer’s Role in Crisis Communications: What Every Lawyer Needs to Know, “ Nashville Bar Association (December 16, 2014)
- Presenter, “Representing Physicians in Dealing With Hospitals,” Nashville Council of Health Care Attorneys (July 8, 2014)
- Presenter, “Health Law Tips for General Practitioners: When Employment Law and Health Law Collide,” Tennessee Bar Association (May 16, 2014)
- Mark Ison, Drafting and Negotiating Physician Employment Agreements – Part 4, Sherrard Roe Voigt & Harbison Blog (November 24, 2014)
- Mark Ison, Drafting and Negotiating Physician Employment Agreements – Part 3, Sherrard Roe Voigt & Harbison Blog (October 17, 2014)
- Mark Ison, Drafting and Negotiating Physician Employment Agreements – Part 2, Sherrard Roe Voigt & Harbison Blog (September 23, 2014)
- Mark Ison, Drafting and Negotiating Physician Employment Agreements – Part 1, Sherrard Roe Voigt & Harbison Blog (September 4, 2014)
- “Having Your Cake and Eating It, Too: The Permissibility of Provider-Site Information Requests to be Used in Contractor-Site Reviews,” Tennessee Medicine, at 29, co-author (February 2008)
- “Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right: Medicaid, Section 1983 and the Cost of an Enforceable Right to Health Care,” 56 Vand. L. Rev. 1479 (2003)
PROFESSIONAL ACTITIVIES
- Adjunct Instructor in Health Law, Belmont University College of Law
- Member, American Health Lawyers Association
- Member, Executive Council of the Health Law Section of the Tennessee Bar Association
- Member, Health Law Section of the American Bar Association
- Member, Nashville Bar Association
- Member, Tennessee Bar Association
- Tennessee Bar Association Leadership Law (Class of 2013)
CIVIC ACTIVITIES
- Member, First Presbyterian Church, Nashville