Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement
HOSPITAL-PHYSICIAN BUSINESS DEALS UNDER SCRUTINY
Heads up hospitals and physicians: The feds are looking ever more closely at medical group-hospital business arrangements and if they suspect a deal may not be kosher, the costs can be huge. Just last month, for example, the Department of Justice scored the largest settlement ever under the Stark physician self-referral law, securing $6.5 million from a South Dakota hospital. Now it looks like the HHS Office of Inspector General is casting its gaze on a quintet of facilities owned by hospital giant Tenet Health-care Corp. The company admitted April 17 that the OIG has served it with a civil subpoena seeking information relating to agreements five Tenet hospitals had with Los Gatos, CA-based physician group The Women's Cancer Center and 10 of its physicians. The Women's Cancer Center has more than a dozen offices in Nevada and California. While it's not clear at press time what the OIG is after, the investigation is just one of the probes launched against Tenet. The OIG and the Department of Justice also have their eyes on the company's outlier billing and inpatient coding practices. Lesson Learned: With the feds' stepped up attention to hospital-medical group business deals, doctors and hospitals alike need to make sure their arrangements pass muster under complex anti-fraud rules.
"Civil subpoenas for information from the OIG are not uncommon in the highly regulated health care industry," Tenet Chief Corporate Officer Christi Schulzbach points out. "We will cooperate fully so that the agency may complete its inquiry in a timely fashion."
The hospitals addressed in the subpoena are: Community Hospital of Los Gatos, Doctors Medical Center of Modesto, CA, San Ramon Regional Medical Center, the now-shuttered St. Luke Medical Center in Pasadena, CA, and Lake Mead Medical Center in North Las Vegas, NV.
Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement
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HOSPITAL-PHYSICIAN BUSINESS DEALS UNDER SCRUTINY
Heads up hospitals and physicians: The feds are looking ever more closely at medical group-hospital [...] - Reimbursement:
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