Why Telephone Timekeeping (Telephony) For Home Healthcare Compliance? Article

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Why Telephone Timekeeping (Telephony) for Home Healthcare Compliance?

The small to mid sized agency cannot afford not to have a validation tool either. The stakes are too high. You will be, at some time, a recipient of an audit.

Author: Richard Ward

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"xxx to Pay $150 Million to Resolve Allegations" read the disturbing headline today. A very large national home health provider made a settlement for a "deferred prosecution agreement " with attorneys general from 40 states in response to allegations that they defrauded Medicare and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs program out $61 million in claims.

If you have been in Home Healthcare even for a short while you know that to receive reimbursements you must submit a mountain of paperwork and validation. The US government and its entities charged with managing the programs ("Managed Care Providers") are doled out blocks of money to their respective areas to administer to the "Service Provider" (Certified Home Healthcare Agency). These Agencies are to submit paperwork to be reimbursed for home healthcare services they provided.

Now to say this process may be a bureaucratic mess is a gross understatement. The totals are somewhere between 50 - 100 Billion dollars of fraud in Medicare each year. So how does this fraud happen? And when it happens, how does it reflect on those agencies who are doing it "right".

Government oversight has given a mandate to find those agencies who are defrauding the government and the taxpayer to the point of hiring contractors who are paid a percentage of the money they recover. I have personally spoken with four agencies in the past four weeks who have undergone such an audit. It is disruptive, draining, stressful and demeaning to those who act with integrity and compassion towards their patients.

It is no wonder that multiple states around the country are now pilot testing telephone timekeeping systems (telephony) as a way to combat the fraud and to obtain real "visit verification" data that can be used to confirm an actual visit was made. But one size does not fit all!

What about those patients without phones? The efforts to lobby state governments by software or consulting firms for one specific technology is sure to meet with serious problems. (Even for telephony). I am sure that the ultimate solution will be a combined technology that can be easily implemented anywhere and with any patient.

So where does that leave the rest of us? The small to mid sized agency cannot afford not to have a validation tool either. The stakes are too high. You will be, at some time, a recipient of an audit. The odds are against you. But not all agencies can afford the big expensive, complex software. But fortunately economical solutions such as Caretime exist for the rest. With margins as tight as they are and regulations piling upon regulations, can one really afford not to deploy an affordable solution? After all, you are in the Caregiving business. You shouldn't be distracted from your purpose and your calling.

About Author

I am CEO of Caretime, LLC which provides employee management solutions for Medical, Home Care, Healthcare, Staffing, Healthcare at Home (consumers) and other medical or healthcare related services . These solutions enable our customers to accurately track time, attendance, and activities of its remote workers.

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Why Telephone Timekeeping (Telephony) for Home Healthcare Compliance?