Awarded Second Place in the 2017 AJN Book of the Year Awards in Advanced Practice Nursing! Nurse Practitioner's Business Practice and Legal Guide, Sixth Edition is a must-have resource for every new or current nurse practitioner (NP) that explains and analyzes the legal issues relevant to nurse practitioners. Completely updated and revised, it includes a new chapter on answering frequently asked questions from NPs. In addition, it provides the latest state-by-state laws, including regulatory developments and prosecutions of nurse practitioners, and new case analyses and lessons learned from those cases. The Sixth Edition also offers new discussions of NP competencies, how the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) degree relates to NPs, the differences in primary care and acute care NPs, definitions of medical bio-ethics terminology, additional malpractice cases and the lessons to learn from them, emerging issues in health policy, guidelines around prescribing opioids and controlled drugs, clinical performance measures, electronic health records, and new opportunities for NPs under the Affordable Care Act. What's more, it addresses emerging health law issues with analysis of key cases, including: * Examples regarding trouble over NPs and kickbacks * Stark Law compliance issues and related criminal cases involving nurse practitioners who are employed by hospitals * Nurse practitioners who have encountered issues with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) * An attempted work around for the Medicare requirement that a physician order home care resulting in an NP using a physician's name to order home care and then being prosecuted for identity theft * An NP and physician who did not follow Medicare's incident-to rules and both the NP and MD were charged with health care fraud * Criminal cases against NPs who prescribed opioids or steroids either without authorization or without appropriate evaluation and monitoring