What Home Health Providers Can Learn From Hospice OIG Audits

Home Health Care News | By Patrick Filbin

The home health industry should keep its collective eye on the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Office of the Inspector General’s (HHS-OIG) recent audits on the hospice industry, because it soon could be next.
 
As the home health space continues to grow, federal oversight and the scrutiny attached to the industry have grown with it.
 
Experts at Husch Blackwell have followed this trend through the hospice industry, and have gleaned knowledge from that.
 
“As we have been following and reporting on those hospice audits, the OIG has been looking at the home health space as well,” Bryan Nowicki said this week on a podcast episode of Hospice Insights. “They’re very similar in overall structure with what we have been working on with hospice. They’re looking for certain kinds of errors that they’ve identified as being recurring or ‘top of mind’ in the home health field.”
 
When the OIG first began its hospice audits in 2021, the office was looking for things like whether beneficiaries met the definition of being confined to a home; whether they were truly in need of skilled services; whether the OASIS information was being submitted in a timely fashion; and whether services were properly documented.
 
Those were the four priorities being reviewed by the OIG, Nowicki said. Now the OIG is cranking up those efforts and focus areas, this time for home health agencies.
 
“Frankly, those are pretty recurring issues in home health,” Nowicki said. “We would expect more of the same, but [the audit process] is going to be guided by what they actually find. Audits are happening now and the OIG’s goal is to begin issuing final audit reports and publishing them on their website in 2023.”
 
Unlike many audits, results from the OIG audits are made public, which creates even more anxiety from the industry, according to Husch Blackwell attorney Meg Pekarske.

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