Home Health & Hospice Week

If you don't want to be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in Medicare repayments, you'd better tighten up your exclusions database checking. But even that may not always help.

Example: Conestoga View Nursing in Lan-caster, Pa. had to pay $265,000 after it employed an excluded individual, the OIG says on its website. The excluded person didn't furnish direct patient care, but was a unit clerk, according to press reports.

The clerk failed to disclose that she was stripped of her LPN license for drug-related issues. And when Conestoga checked the exclusions database under the name she gave, she came up clean.

Tool: You can access a new OIG podcast on how to use the exclusions database at http://go.usa. gov/5no%2. The presentation is the last of 11 installments in the OIG's Provider Compliance Training initiative. The content comes from the OIG's Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforce-ment Action Team (HEAT) training given last spring in six cities across the country.