Home Health & Hospice Week

You can call benes based on a doc's order, CMS allows You need to make sure your patients who are referred by their doctors know their doc is contacting you, or you'll run afoul of a new compliance clarification from the feds. In January, the HHS Office of Inspector General reissued a fraud alert on prohibiting unsolicited telemarketing from durable medical equipment suppliers to Medicare beneficiaries. But in the alert, the OIG said suppliers couldn't call benes  even if the patients' physicians had requested that they do so. The new twist had the supplier community up in arms, since that is the way many referrals take place (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XIX, No. 4, p. 28). Now the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is taking that new provision back --at least in part. DME suppliers may contact beneficiaries if the physician contacts the supplier with the order -- AND the [...]