Home Health & Hospice Week

Here's how to keep your agency out of federal crosshairs. If you're providing too much help with insulin injections, the HHS Office of Inspector General could soon be on your doorstep. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services covers assisted insulin injections when a patient can't self-inject insulin and there's no family member or caregiver to help. But outlier payments for insulin injections are out of control -- and curbing those payments is at the top of the OIG's target list, according to its 2010 Work Plan, released earlier this month. Standard practice: Injections given daily or multiple times each day to patients who are physically or mentally incapacitated result in outlier payments under the Medicare prospective payment system (PPS) because the cost greatly exceeds the episode payment, explains Judy Adams, president and CEO of Adams Home Care Consulting in Chapel Hill, N.C. "CMS pays 80 percent of the excess 'cost' [...]