Managing competition in the medical profession.

The medical profession always has been viewed as more than a business. Patients often view their physician as a counselor or friend, in whom they entrust their health and to whom they often reveal the most private matters. As with other relationships involving trust (e.g., attorney-client and priest-penitent), the law even recognizes a special privilege for communications between doctors and patients. Due in part to this special relationship, Delaware’s Court of Chancery has, at times, only reluctantly applied laws protecting businesses to medical practices.1 The simple truth is that the practice of medicine is in part a business. In business, profitability matters. As medical practices evolve, business mergers and divorces occur, and physicians, like other employees, come and go. Physician departures often raise thorny issues regarding the patient base that is the practice’s life blood. This article offers some guidance as to how, through proper planning and careful navigation of employment competition laws, medical practices can strike the proper balance between protecting patient and business interests.2