Eli's Hospice Insider

Atlanta hospice forks over half-million dollars to lay fraud charges to rest.

You'd better make sure your general inpatient hospice claims are well documented, because the government's campaign against fraudulent GIP billing continues.

Case in point: AHH Historic Inc. hospice in Atlanta will pay $555,000 to settle charges that it upcoded GIP days, says the FBI in a release. The government alleges that AHH, formerly known as Altus Healthcare & Hospice Inc., submitted false claims to the Medicare and Medicaid programs for GIP care for patients who did not qualify to receive that level of hospice care from 2008 to 2011.

The settlement is a result of a False Claims Act suit filed by whistleblower David C. Boal, who will receive part of the settlement. Boal is identified in a 2008 Gainesville Times news article as a hospice worker.

"Altus Healthcare allegedly milked Medicare's hospice benefit to increase their own profit as much as possible," Derrick Jackson, Special Agent in Charge of the HHS Office of Inspector General for the Atlanta region, says in the release. The OIG "is committed to eliminating this greed from our nation's health care system."

Altus was acquired by Halcyon Healthcare in December 2011.