Home Health & Hospice Week

Watch out for potential conflicts of interest, experts warn.

Your Medicare patients are confused about the new Part D drug benefit, and they may look to your home care organization for help--but watch out for several pitfalls.

If your home care company helps Medicare patients figure out their prescription drug options, you can reap a huge reward in reputation, says marketing expert Terry McVey with McVey Associates in Novato, CA. "Creating trust is the secret to gaining new patients," McVey adds.

Unfortunately, if you help your patients too much with choosing a drug plan, it could look like a conflict of interest to the feds, warns consultant Phyllis Yingling with Apple A Day in Hilton Head, SC.

Health care providers need to stay out of it, Yingling warns. Because insurance companies and drug makers are offering their own plans, there are plenty of pitfalls if you recommend one particular plan over others. In California alone, there are 45 stand-alone drug plans and another 85 offered by managed care plans, according to press reports.

"It's Medicare's responsibility to educate the public on this," Yingling continues.

Useful information on the new drug benefit is available online, but the Internet may not be the best medium for educating seniors. It's "a technology-based solution applied to a non-technology-based population," laments Jill Young with Young Medical Consulting in East Lansing, MI.

The good news is that some private groups, or county health or aging departments, are running local seminars to help patients sort through all their prescription drug options, says Young.

What you can do: Offer contact phone numbers for all the plans in your area or hand out fliers for upcoming seminars, suggests Yingling. But she doesn't advise getting too heavily involved in helping patients navigate the maze of drug plans--or you could find yourself in trouble. "It's very complex," she warns.

Note: CMS' Part D Web site, including patient handouts, posters and other tools, is at www.cms.hhs.gov/MedlearnProducts/23_drugcoverage.asp.