Home Health & Hospice Week

You can bet homebound status will be a vulnerable point. ZPIC audits are shutting down home care providers across the country. If you don't want to be one of the casualties, there are steps you can take to prepare before an audit ever hits your doorstep. Zone Program Integrity Contractor activity "is even more lethal" than Operation Restore Trust investigations in the late 1990s, when one-third of the industry was put out of business, worries consultant Pam Warmack with Clinic Connections in Ruston, La. "I fear we will see closure of providers as well as prosecutions," Warmack predicts. The ZPICs the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has named in three zones are hitting agencies with audits. Then those HHAs are getting hit with astronomical extrapolated overpayment demands or payment suspensions (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XIX, No. 32, p. 250). Here are steps you can take before an audit to guard [...]