Industry Note:
Data Mining Leads To Hospice Fraud Settlement
Published on Thu Jun 07, 2012
Owners excluded from Medicare for 7 years.If your billing is outside the norm, you'd better make sure you can back it up.Two former hospice owners have learned that lesson the hard way. Hospice Family Care Inc. in Phoenix has agreed to pay $3.7 million to resolve allegations that it "submitted claims for payment to Medicare for patients who were either completely or partially hospice ineligible or were provided a higher level of hospice care than was necessary or allowable," according to a release from Arizona U.S. Attorney Ann Birmingham Scheel. And former Hospice Family Care owners Nancy Smith and Nancy Turner agreed to be excluded from Medi-care, Medicaid, and all other federal health care programs for seven years."Our agents used sophisticated data analysis techniques to investigate Hospice Family Care's activities," Glenn Ferry, Special Agent in Charge of the HHS Office of Inspector General region covering Arizona, says in the release. [...]