Contacting Car Accident Victims in Ohio: What Healthcare Providers Need to Know in 2026

If you’re a healthcare provider in Ohio — a chiropractor, physical therapist, or orthopedic specialist — timing matters when reaching accident victims. The faster you connect with someone who needs care, the better the outcome for them and for your practice.

But Ohio has a statute written for this exact situation, and most national compliance guidance doesn’t mention it. Here’s what actually governs.

Updated July 31, 2026. An earlier version of this guide stated that federal law requires prior express written consent before any marketing text, omitted Ohio R.C. 1349.05 entirely, and described attorney solicitation rules as a 30-day ban. All three were wrong and have been corrected below.

Start here: Ohio R.C. 1349.05

Ohio Revised Code § 1349.05 — “Solicitation of employment by health care practitioner” — covers chiropractors explicitly, and applies equally to anyone compensated to solicit on a practitioner’s behalf. If you use a marketing agency, the statute reaches them too.

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. 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 runs through the Ohio Attorney General at up to $5,000 per violation, and after three separate violations the licensing agency suspends the practitioner’s license.

“One text, total” means one. Not one per week, not a follow-up if they don’t answer. If someone is selling you a multi-touch SMS sequence aimed at Ohio accident victims, the sequence itself is the problem.

The status of this statute, and why we still follow it

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

It would be easy to read that as open season. We don’t, for four reasons:

The appeal is live. The case is pending before the Supreme Court of Ohio (No. 2024-0945), argued June 4, 2025 and still under submission as of this writing. A reversal doesn’t just restore the statute going forward — it means it was never invalid.
Class certification was vacated. Relief runs to the named plaintiffs, and the decision is binding precedent only in the Eighth District. If you aren’t a party and aren’t in Cuyahoga County, you’re relying on a judgment that isn’t yours.
The free-speech challenge already lost. The Sixth Circuit upheld Ohio’s restriction against a First Amendment attack in First Choice Chiropractic v. DeWine (2020) as a valid commercial-speech regulation protecting victims’ privacy. There is no constitutional backstop.
A procedural defect is trivially curable. The statute hasn’t been amended since 2020, so the defect is uncured — but the General Assembly can re-pass identical language as a standalone bill whenever it chooses.

Build your process to the statute’s limits and let the litigation resolve without you in it.

The 30-day rule on phone numbers

This one surprises people. Ohio crash reports are public records — but the victim’s phone number is not, for the first 30 days.

Under R.C. 149.43(A)(1)(oo), telephone numbers for a party to a motor vehicle accident that appear on a law enforcement record are excluded from the definition of “public record” — and that exclusion lifts on and after the thirtieth day after the crash.

So the report you pull on day 1 and the report you pull on day 31 are the same report with different contents. If your data provider hands you a phone number on a fresh crash, ask where it came from; it didn’t come from the report.

(Note this is a separate provision from the one at issue in the Allied Health litigation, which concerned crime victims and witnesses. The motor-vehicle phone rule was moved to its own subsection in 2021 and is not affected by that case.)

Federal rules that apply to everyone

The most common piece of bad advice about text outreach is that federal law requires prior express written consent before any marketing text. That is not what the TCPA says.

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

That distinction is narrower than it sounds, because three federal rules apply regardless of whether a human or a machine sends the message:

1. The National Do Not Call Registry. Liability under § 227(c) never depended on autodialing, and after Duguid plaintiffs’ firms shifted to DNC claims wholesale. Damages are $500–$1,500 per message. There’s currently a circuit split on whether texts count — the Seventh Circuit held in July 2026 that a text isn’t a “telephone call” for 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, identification of yourself and your practice in the message, and honoring opt-out requests within 10 days (a deadline tightened effective April 11, 2025). It carries 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 (8 a.m. to 8 p.m.), and carriers filter on them.

CAN-SPAM (email)

The CAN-SPAM Act governs commercial email and, unlike § 227(b), requires no prior consent — but it does require:

Accurate header information; your “From” name and address must identify your practice
A non-deceptive subject line that reflects the content
Identification of the message as an advertisement
Your physical postal address in every email
A clear opt-out mechanism, honored promptly
Penalties exceeding $50,000 per violation, adjusted annually for inflation

Important interaction: CAN-SPAM permitting unconsented email does not override R.C. 1349.05(D), which caps you at one email total per accident party. Federal law setting no consent floor and state law setting a hard ceiling are not in conflict — you have to satisfy both.

Ohio-specific rules for healthcare providers

The Ohio State Chiropractic Board

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, and no contacting minors
Advertising must identify the licensed Ohio chiropractor who approved it, and use “chiropractic,” “chiropractor,” “doctor of chiropractic,” or “chiropractic physician” in at least ten-point font
No cash or gift cards as referral incentives

Separately, OAC Rule 4734-9-09 prohibits fee splitting and bars conditioning payment to anyone who solicits patients on the volume of referrals. Pay a marketing vendor a flat fee — not per patient, per appointment, or as a percentage of billings, however the invoice is captioned.

Ohio Consumer Sales Practices Act (ORC § 1345.02)

Ohio’s consumer protection law prohibits deceptive or unconscionable practices. For post-accident outreach:

Don’t make misleading claims about treatment outcomes
Don’t imply specific knowledge of someone’s injuries — reports are public records, but implying medical knowledge about a stranger is both invasive and potentially deceptive
Be truthful about services, costs, and qualifications
Don’t use high-pressure tactics or manufacture urgency

Public records vs. protected health information

Crash reports are public records (with the 30-day phone-number carve-out above). Accessing and using that data is legal.
Medical information is protected under HIPAA. Never reference or imply knowledge of someone’s condition, diagnosis, or treatment history.
The safe framing: reference the accident generally (“we help people involved in car accidents recover”), not specifically (“we know you were injured in the crash on Main Street”).

What attorneys can do — and why it’s different

A persistent misconception, and one this guide previously repeated: Ohio does not ban attorney solicitation of accident victims for 30 days.

Ohio Prof. Cond. R. 7.3 restricts channel, not timing — no in-person, live telephone, or real-time electronic solicitation. Written, recorded, and electronic communications are permitted, and one sent within 30 days of the accident must carry the mandatory “Understanding Your Rights” disclosure, which closes by stating that the Supreme Court of Ohio “neither promotes nor prohibits the direct solicitation of personal injury victims.”

The tidy way to remember it: the statutory caps people assume bind attorneys actually bind chiropractors, and the ethics rules people assume bind chiropractors actually bind attorneys. R.C. 1349.05 reaches health care practitioners and their paid solicitors — not lawyers.

The compliant playbook

✅ 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. recipient-local time
Send mail
Identify yourself and your practice in every message
Advertise, publish educational content, and accept referrals — none of these caps apply to any of that

❌ What you can’t do

Contact anyone in the first 24 hours
Approach an accident victim in person — barred 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

How Gameplan Network helps

We provide Ohio crash report data and enriched contact information to healthcare providers across all 88 counties, with DNC scrubbing built in.

Because the limits above are per-person rather than per-campaign, the useful unit isn’t an outreach blast — 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. Fast data, delivered with the compliance state attached, so the send decision is made against facts rather than a spreadsheet.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute 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. We strongly recommend consulting a qualified Ohio attorney before implementing any outreach strategy. This reflects our understanding as of July 2026.

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