Home Health & Hospice Week

Watchdog agency OKs nominal gift cards to patients.

If you furnish modest gift cards to your patients, you can breathe a sigh of relief that you probably aren't breaking the law.

The HHS Office of Inspector General has given its stamp of approval to a hospital system that wants to give patients a $10 gift card to resolve service complaints.

"The gift cards in the proposed arrangement will be nominal in value and will not constitute cash or cash equivalents for purposes of our enforcement policy under the [civil monetary penalty]," the OIG concludes. "Accordingly, we would not impose sanctions on the requestor under the CMP." The same goes for anti-kickback rules, the OIG adds.

Key safeguards: The reason the gift cards are OK is because they will be issued for specific vendors and can't be exchanged for cash, will be limited to $10 and will be tracked to make sure a patient doesn't receive more than $50 in cards per year, the OIG points out.

Beware Self-Policing Difficulties

But don't take the OIG's opinion as carte blanche to distribute gift cards to patients, warns health care attorney Elizabeth Hogue based in Washington, DC. "I would not advise clients to provide them unless all of the criteria on which the OIG bases its decision are met," Hogue tells Eli.

Even that may not be enough to steer clear of kickback concerns. "It will be really hard to police compliance with these criteria within an agency," Hogue predicts.

"For this reason, the best course of action may still be to prohibit gift cards altogether," Hogue concludes.

Note: The OIG opinion is online at www.oig.hhs.gov/fraud/docs/advisoryopinions/2008/AdvOpn08-07.pdf.