The US Department of Justice announced that 301 individuals have been charged with falsely billing Medicare a total of approximately $900 million in what is being called the largest coordinated Medicare fraud take down in history.
Home health services were among a list of services involved in the fraud schemes that also included physical and occupational therapy, durable medical equipment (DME) and prescription drugs. In the process, the HHS Inspector General released a data brief titled “Nationwide Analysis of Common Characteristics in OIG Home Health Fraud Cases.”
That data brief reveal some trends in outlier patterns among home health agencies and affiliated physicians, but also identifies 27 “hot spots” in 12 states where home health care fraud is prevalent. Massachusetts is not among the states shown in the map below where much of the home health fraud activity is occurring.
Recently, Massachusetts has been included in a planned “pre-claim review” demonstration starting “no earlier” than January 2017 that will, according to CMS, test whether such a process improves methods for the identification, investigation, and prosecution of Medicare fraud occurring among Home Health Agencies. Among the five states involved in the demonstration, Massachusetts is the only one not on any target list for the Medicare Fraud Task force known as HEAT (Health Care Fraud Prevention & Enforcement Action Team). For many years, the Home Care Alliance has repeatedly advocated for a temporary moratorium on new Medicare home health providers in response to recent growth in the number of new agencies, but such efforts have been denied by Medicare.
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