Home Health & Hospice Week

The owner of a New Orleans hospice has been indicted on Medicare fraud.

Canon Healthcare owner Shiva Akula instructed employees to bill for unnecessary General Inpatient services and to bill for evaluation and management CPT^® Codes 99233 and 99236, the Department of Justice says in a release. “These physician services reflected in CPT^® Codes 99236 and 99233 should not have been billed as a separate line item in addition to the GIP services because they were included within the daily per diem rate that Medicare paid for the GIP services,” the DOJ explains.

Canon also submitted claims to Medicare for about 1,949 home visits using CPT^® code 99350 that “were purported to have been performed by a doctor, when a doctor did not perform home visits,” the DOJ adds. Canon received nearly $3 million in related false payments, the feds allege.