Home Health & Hospice Week

How tight are your criminal background check policies and procedures? Now's the time to double check.

For the first time, L795 was in the list of top 10 tags cited in hospice surveys, said Kim Roche with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice's March on Washington conference March 28.

L795 is the tag for the first part of the criminal background check standard: "The hospice must obtain a criminal background check on all hospice employees who have direct patient contact or access to patient records. Hospice contracts must require that all contracted entities obtain criminal background checks on contracted employees who have direct patient contact or access to patient records."

And background checks aren't just a hospice issue. CMS is hard at work on the National Background Check Program, Roche noted at the conference.

What it is: The program "will help identify 'best practices' for long term care providers to determine whether a job seeker has any kind of criminal history or other disqualifying background that could make them unsuitable to work directly with long term care clients/ residents," CMS says on its website. The program includes several different longterm care provider types, including home health agencies and hospices.

The program now has 10 states, which receive federal matching funds for participating, according to CMS's Karen Schoeneman, speaking during a March 17 SNF/LTC Open Door Forum.

The states in the program to date include Alaska, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Missouri, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, and California, she reported. States and territories still have to time to get in the program. The background check program is expected to run until around the fall of 2013, Schoeneman added. "After that time, [the HHS Office of Inspector General] is going to do an evaluation and a report to Congress."

Plus: CMS just closed a second solicitation period in mid-February that may result in more states participating in the background check program. And "CMS is considering issuance of a third solicitation in the near future," the agency adds.

Under the program the FBI is helping to implement, a background check requires for each prospective employee a criminal history search of both state and FBI records as well as other state resources such as the nurse aide registry, CMS notes.

Warning: Background check scrutiny of all post-acute providers may increase, thanks to a recent OIG report that found a whopping 92 percent of sampled nursing facilities had employed at least one person with a criminal conviction.