What an Ohio Chiropractor Can and Can't Do When Contacting Crash Victims

Most compliance advice about contacting car accident victims is written for the whole country, which means it’s written for nobody. Ohio has a statute that speaks to this exact situation by name, and it’s more specific — and in some ways more permissive — than the generic guidance suggests.

Here’s what actually governs a chiropractor’s outreach to an Ohio crash victim.

The Ohio statute that governs this directly: R.C. 1349.05

Ohio Revised Code § 1349.05 is titled “Solicitation of employment by health care practitioner.” It covers chiropractors explicitly, and — this part matters if you use a marketing agency — it applies equally to anyone compensated to solicit on a practitioner’s behalf.

For a party to a motor vehicle accident, subsection (D) sets these limits:

Channel	What the statute allows
In person	Never
Phone	Not more than one call per 48-hour period
Text message	One, total
Email	One, total
U.S. Mail	One letter

All of it begins 24 hours after the accident — nothing before that.

There’s a narrow exception for contacting a prior customer under the same business name, where the practice has operated under that name for at least three years.

Enforcement: the Ohio Attorney General can fine violations up to $5,000 each, and after three separate violations the licensing agency suspends the practitioner’s license. Note who carries that risk — the license on the line is the chiropractor’s, not the marketer’s.

The part your agency may not have told you

“One text, total” means one. Not one per week, not a drip sequence, not “one, then a follow-up if they don’t answer.” If you’re being sold a multi-touch SMS campaign aimed at Ohio accident victims, the sequence itself is the problem, regardless of how carefully each individual message is worded.

An important caveat on this statute’s status

In 2024, Ohio’s Eighth District Court of Appeals held that R.C. 1349.05 was unconstitutionally enacted — not because of what it says, but because the legislature tucked it into a budget bill in violation of Ohio’s one-subject rule (Allied Health & Chiropractic, L.L.C. v. State, 2024-Ohio-1976).

Before you treat that as an opening, three things:

It’s on appeal. The case is before the Supreme Court of Ohio (No. 2024-0945). A reversal doesn’t just restore the statute going forward — it means it was never invalid.
The free-speech challenge already failed. The Sixth Circuit upheld Ohio’s restriction against a First Amendment attack in First Choice Chiropractic v. DeWine (2020), finding it a valid commercial-speech regulation protecting victims’ privacy. There is no constitutional backstop here.
A procedural defect is trivially curable. The legislature can re-pass the same language as a standalone bill whenever it wants.

The prudent posture is to build your process to the statute’s limits and let the litigation resolve without you in it.

The federal layer: what the TCPA actually says

There’s a persistent myth that federal law requires prior express written consent before any marketing text. That’s not quite right, and the distinction matters.

Prior express written consent is required for autodialed and prerecorded messages under 47 U.S.C. § 227(b). Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Facebook v. Duguid (2021), an “automatic telephone dialing system” has to use a random or sequential number generator. A person typing a message on a phone isn’t one.

But three federal rules apply regardless of whether a human or a machine sends the message:

1. The National Do Not Call Registry

DNC liability under § 227(c) never depended on autodialing. After Duguid, plaintiffs’ firms shifted to DNC claims wholesale. Damages are $500–$1,500 per message.

There is currently a split on whether texts count: the Seventh Circuit held in July 2026 that a text isn’t a “telephone call” under the DNC private right of action, while the Ninth Circuit went the other way in January 2026. The Sixth Circuit, which covers Ohio, hasn’t ruled. Ohio practices get no benefit from the favorable case. Scrub against the registry.

2. Your own internal do-not-call list

47 CFR § 64.1200(d) applies to “any call for telemarketing purposes” — automation is irrelevant. It requires:

A written do-not-call policy, available on demand
Identifying yourself and your practice in the message
Honoring opt-out requests within 10 days (a deadline tightened effective April 11, 2025)

This one has its own private right of action and is routinely overlooked, which is exactly why plaintiffs’ firms look for it. Most practices have no policy document at all.

3. Quiet hours

8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. in the recipient’s local time. Industry messaging guidelines are tighter still (8 a.m. to 8 p.m.), and carriers filter on them.

The Ohio State Chiropractic Board’s own rules

OAC Rule 4734-9-02 governs advertising and solicitation, and it’s more concrete than most practices realize:

Retain solicitation scripts and contact records for six months
Calls only between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. local time
Maintain a “do not call” list for anyone who asks not to be contacted again
The caller must identify themselves and the chiropractor within the first 60 seconds
No repeated contact after someone declines
No contacting minors
Advertising must identify a licensed Ohio chiropractor who approved it, and use the words “chiropractic,” “chiropractor,” “doctor of chiropractic,” or “chiropractic physician” in at least ten-point font
No cash or gift cards as referral incentives

Paying for patients: don’t

OAC Rule 4734-9-09 prohibits fee splitting and bars conditioning payment to anyone who solicits patients on the volume of referrals obtained. The only person a licensee can pay based on patient volume is a licensed doctor of chiropractic employed by the practice.

Practically: pay a marketing vendor a flat fee for the service. Don’t pay per patient, per appointment, or as a percentage of billings — no matter how the invoice is captioned.

The practical summary

✅ What you can do

Contact an accident party starting 24 hours after the crash
Send one text and one email, ever, to that person about that accident
Call once per 48 hours, within 8 a.m.–9 p.m. local time
Send mail
Identify yourself and your practice clearly in every message
Advertise, publish educational content, and take referrals without any of these limits applying

❌ What you can’t do

Contact anyone in the first 24 hours
Approach an accident victim in person — the statute bars this outright, with no waiting period that cures it
Run a drip sequence, a follow-up text, or a second email to the same party
Text a number on the National DNC Registry
Send anything without a written internal DNC policy and sender identification
Keep contacting someone after they decline
Pay anyone per patient

What this means for how you buy data

The limits above are why we think the useful unit isn’t “an outreach campaign” — it’s a lead that arrives with its permission state attached: when the 24-hour hold lifts, whether the number is DNC-eligible, and whether that person’s single text has already been spent.

At Gameplan Network we deliver Ohio crash data across all 88 counties with DNC scrubbing and contact enrichment, so the outreach decision is made against real compliance state rather than a spreadsheet. The message goes out under your license, on your schedule, inside the caps.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice. R.C. 1349.05 is the subject of pending litigation before the Supreme Court of Ohio, and the federal circuit split described above is unresolved. Consult an Ohio-licensed attorney before launching any outreach program. Information reflects our understanding as of July 2026.

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