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Nick Healey

With more than 20 years of experience in healthcare law, Nick is an invaluable resource for clients as he leads mergers and complex corporate transactions in the industry.

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Judge's gavel on table in office

The Wyoming Supreme Court began the year 2026 with a landmark decision in State v. Johnson, 2026 WY 1, delivering a ruling with implications that extend far beyond its immediate outcome. While headlines will focus on the Court’s decision to strike down Wyoming’s comprehensive abortion restrictions—the Life is a Human Right Act (“Life Act”)[1] and the Medication Ban[2]—as unconstitutional, the true significance lies elsewhere. The Court held that Wyoming’s constitutional amendment guaranteeing adults the right to make their own healthcare decisions is a fundamental right protected by the highest level of judicial scrutiny.

This holding may ultimately have more far-reaching consequences, setting the stage for future challenges to a wide range of healthcare regulations across Wyoming.

On March 19, 2025, Wyoming passed a new law, SF 107, broadly circumscribing employers’ use of noncompete agreements. Generally, SF 107 broadly prohibits covenants that restrict the right of “any person” to receive compensation for performance of skilled or unskilled labor. The law will take effect on July 1, 2025, and only impacts…

Wyoming physicians are sometimes confronted with the awkward and difficult choice of whether to bring a colleague’s potentially unprofessional, unethical, or harmful conduct to light by making a report to a hospital’s peer review committee, or even the Wyoming Board of Medicine in some circumstances. However, physicians are often unsure whether such a report is justified, and whether it is ethically or legally required. Whether a report is justified or ethically required in any particular situation is beyond the scope of this article–however, we can shed light on whether it is required by Wyoming law.

Distances in rural health care can be hard to fathom. A 2018 study found it took rural Americans, on average, 17 minutes to get to a hospital, but only 10 minutes in an urban center.[i] The distance between rural hospitals can be vastly further – in 2019, a National Institutes of Health study noted that hospitals in one rural state were generally at least 50 miles apart.[ii] These areas have been described (without meaning to be pejorative) as “health deserts.”[iii] Small populations, and a growing shortage of physicians in rural areas,[iv] often lead to hospitals in these areas having only one or two physicians in a particular specialty. Advanced health practitioners (AHP’s) with specialty training, such as psychiatric nurse practitioners or certified nurse midwives, can be an excellent way to preserve access to specialty care, particularly when lack of physician coverage would otherwise mean the hospital must divert or transfer emergency patients.