Home Health & Hospice Week

If you discover improprieties that you must self-disclose to the HHS Office of Inspector General, you have a newly updated set of guidelines to follow. After publishing its initial self-disclosure protocol in 1998 and issuing three Open Letters to Health Care Providers on the topic in 2006, 2008, and 2009, the OIG has revised the SDP "in its entirety at this time," the watchdog agency says.

Take note: One of the most important changes is that the OIG "has implemented a ‘presumption’ against imposing corporate integrity agreement obligations on disclosing parties in exchange for a ‘release of OIG’s permissive exclusion authority,’" reports law firm Sidley Austin in an analysis of the new protocol. "According to the SDP, corporate integrity agreements are not needed in such circumstances because ‘good faith disclosure’ and ‘cooperation’ are ‘typical indications of a robust and effective compliance program,’" the firm notes.

The SDP also sets out specific requirements related to disclosures involving excluded individuals, Sidley notes. "If a disclosing party has em-ployed an excluded individual, it must disclose facts about the excluded individual and describe the existing screening process in place to identify excluded individuals, any flaws in that process that led to the employment of the excluded individual, and a description of how the conduct was discovered," the firm details. "In addition, before the disclosure, the provider must screen all current employees against the List of Excluded Individuals and Entities."

The new SDP is at http://go.usa.gov/TDZG. and a training video is at http://go.usa.gov/TDBd.