Our administration has set battling healthcare fraud, waste and abuse as a high priority. A recent study found $835 million in questionable Medicare payments identified by private contractors in 2007.

Some states are following suit for their Medicaid programs. The Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services also recently issued a report on the efficiencies and improvements in the Illinois Medicaid program that included measures to prevent Medicaid fraud and overpayments by contracting with third parties to conduct payment and recapture audits. The State of Indiana also recently issued a Request for Services to detect fraud, waste and abuse in its Medicaid program.

It is also important to stop money from going out-the-door in the first place. Preventing inappropriate payments can be easier than “recovering” inappropriate payments after the fact — as evidenced by that fact that perpetrators often “close shop” and move on when they are notified of claim disputes. The GAO calls for Medicare to improve the pre-payment review of claims. As predictive modeling technologies continue to evolve pre-payment claim review will become a critical tool to combating fraud.

The “ethically challenged” understand the amount of money in healthcare – and do not limit their prey to government sponsored programs. It is critical for private payers, plan administrators and self-funded employer plans to follow suit in both pre- and post-claim review.

Rebecca’s appearance highlighted her latest book, Personal Healthcare Portfolio: Your Personal Health & Wellness Record. During the segment she offered viewers valuable time and money saving techniques when it comes to healthcare finances.

Here are some tips she provided during the interview:

1. Get your records organized and separate medical from financial.

2. Learn the reimbursement lingo in healthcare — start asking your doctor “What CPT codes are you billing me for?” That is a procedure code — patients never see this. Did you know doctors charge in increments of 15/20/45/60 minutes procedure codes? This is why you have to ask what code they are charging.

3. Ask your doctor “What diagnosis code are they billing in MY name?”

4. Ask for itemized copies of your bills as you receive your care.

5. Make sure you collect your health records as you receive your care — or obtain them once per year (ask your provider what their policy is on retention of records).

6. If your insurance company provides you an EOB (explanation of benefits) without procedure codes — ask them annually to print a claim file with the information. This is the best way to avoid being a victim of medical identity theft.

7. Be vigilant — although we have a healthcare crisis there is lots of money floating around.

To view the entire interview please visit WGN’s site here.

But a seldom discussed impact of healthcare reform on employers is their increased exposure to fraud, waste and abuse. For example,

1) No lifetime or annual limits: If plans have ineligible members or dependents on their plan… now there is no limit to how much employers could be inappropriately paying for coverage of ineligible members.

2) Extension of dependent coverage: Now that employers must allow dependent coverage to continue for an adult up to age 26, plans will have an influx of new dependents… that means more potential ineligible dependents.

3) Waiting periods limited: Employers will have to provide coverage within no more than 90 days… that means employers face the risk of paying for ineligible dependents sooner.

Employers that do not regularly conduct eligibility audits, to ensure that they are not extending coverage to ineligible members and dependents, will face a significant increase in risk due to employee abuse (intentional or not) of benefit coverage. Eligibility audits are a simple way stop inappropriate healthcare expenditures. The reality is that when rules change, “the ethically challenged” will find new ways to capitalize.

For more information on the impact of healthcare reform, check out McGuireWoods Healthcare Reform Guide: Installment No. 8.

Rebecca highlighted the fact that a good foundation based on fraud risk assessments needs to be established to fight fraud. She also points out that insurers and providers need to regularly audit all network activity to assess risk and potential vulnerabilities where holes might be found.

Her opinion on Healthcare Reform – it might lead to an increase in insurance fraud in the short term as information systems are adjusted and new rules are implemented but should eventually decrease fraud, as more individuals will receive health coverage.

The article explains that many small businesses will be faced with numerous choices due to the passage of healthcare reform.

Rebecca asserts that education is important when understanding healthcare reform and how it will affect your business. “The one thing you can control is educating the individual. We spend too much on healthcare not be educating the frontline.”

At the end of the article Rebecca also offers some tips about going about acquiring healthcare. Here is a highlight of what she had to say.
1. Watch out for fraudulent billing, counterfeit medication and medical identity theft. Interesting fact: Americans spend an average of $6,400 every second in healthcare fraud, waste and abuse compared with the estimated $3,400 per second the new legislation is expected to cost.
2. Ask about your bills – overbilling by healthcare providers contributes to the high cost of treatment. Make sure you understand what you are being charged AND for what you are being charged. Example a doctor might bill with a code that says you were at the office for 60 minutes when you only actually saw the doctor for 10.
3. Make sure you are buying insurance from a legitimate insurance provider. Rebecca states, “One of the fastest-growing areas is selling fake insurance.” Research a company before you buy insurance from them. Just remember the adage – if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.

Read full article here.

The article highlights coding audits and the reasons for them – Rebecca asserts that in order for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to lower its costs, it devised several financial recovery divisions to catch overpayments and fraudulent claims. Some audits include RAC (Recovery Audit Contractor), which evaluates a provider’s claims data, and medical records for possible over/under payments and ZPIC (Zone Program Integrity Contractor), which, according to the article, are the “aggressive cousins of RACs formed by CMS to detect fraudulent claims activity.”

Rebecca goes on to discuss payer fraud and how it will affect health information technology (HIM). HIM departments need to audit yearly to ensure they are not releasing personal health information (PHI) into the hands of fraudsters. As Rebecca states, “For HIM, the ‘year of the audit’ is about ‘releasers beware.’”

Criminals pose as insurers to obtain medical records and other sensitive information more times then one would think. Rebecca says, “This is what makes HIM vulnerable – people who really understand how the department works and how correspondence works. They are writing letters in a typical format that is routine. So it is going to really easy to miss letters that don’t have altruistic intent.”

With 2010 being the year of the audit everyone in the healthcare industry needs to be alert and in top form. The government is looking for overpayments. Insurance companies are looking for overpayments. Hospitals need money to continue to provide services and can’t afford to miscode, bill incorrectly or anything in between. It is a buyer’s beware market out there and patients most likely the ones to be most affected by these audit initiatives.

1. Rent-a-Patient Scheme
In this scheme organizations pay for—or “rent”—individuals to go to clinics for unnecessary diagnostic tests and cursory examinations. The scary thing is that licensed physicians sometimes participate in the rent-a-patient scheme. Case and point: Robert Bourseau, 75, was sentenced to 37 months in prison and ordered to pay $4.1 million in restitution for his role in a scheme to defraud Medicare and Medi-Cal. He pleaded guilty in June to paying a recruiter to deliver homeless patients to his hospital for unnecessary medical services.

2. Pill Mill Scheme
In this scheme, separate health care individuals and entities (usually including a pharmacy) collude to generate a flood of fraudulent claims that Medicaid pays. After a prescription is filled, the beneficiary sells the medication to pill buyers on the street who then sell the drugs back to the pharmacy. Example: Rick Kloxin, pharmacist in charge of Hogan’s Pharmacy in Lyons, Kans., was found guilty in an internet pill mill scheme. Kloxin pled no contest and was found guilty of 14 misdemeanor counts of violating Kansas Pharmacy laws.

3. Drop Box Scheme
This scheme uses a private mailbox facility as the fraudulent health care entity’s address, with the entity’s “suite” number actually being its mailbox number. The fraudulent health care entity then uses the address to submit fraudulent Medicare, Medicaid, and other insurance claims and to receive insurance checks.

4. Third-Party Billing Scheme
The third-party billing scheme revolves around a third-party biller—who may or may not be part of the scheme—who prepares and remits claims to Medicare or Medicaid (electronically or by paper) for health care providers. It is possible, however, for a third-party biller to defraud Medicare, Medicaid, and others by adding claims without the providers’ knowledge and keeping the remittances or by allowing fraudulent claims to be billed to Medicare or Medicaid through its service. Example: Recently, in Miami, Ihosvany Marquez and several alleged conspirators were indicted on charges of having filed $55 million in phony Medicare claims for HIV, AIDS, cancer, pain and varicose vein treatments.

Frequent incidences of prescription drug misuse:
1. Doctor shopping – hopping from doctor to doctor in order to receive medication and deceive the doctor. Patients also go doctor shopping to find a doctor that will “address” all their prescription needs i.e. over prescribing.
2. Manually changing the dose of the prescription. Example: If the prescription is written for 25 pills, they might add a 1 in front of it to make it 125 or a 0 at the end to make it 250.
3. Medical identity theft – stealing a victim’s insurance card and obtaining prescriptions under the victim’s name.
4. Inside cooperation – stealing a doctor’s prescription pad and writing prescriptions.

This list is by no means exhaustive. It just gives you a clue to what is occurring.

What are Pharmaceutical companies doing?
1. Making pills tamperproof – meaning that if they’re crushed for a stronger, more rapid high they become ineffective.
2. Patient medication guides explaining the exact purpose of the drugs and the consequences of misuse.
3. Letters to doctors and additional physician training to end the misuse and inappropriate prescribing of painkillers.

Those last 2 strategies are debatable, but they are necessary steps that need to be taken to combat prescription drug addiction.

How can providers combat the misuse?
1. Electronic health records can help combat this problem. The physician would be able to see that the patient has seen an abnormal amount of doctors and see what the patient was prescribed – eliminating the ability for a patient to be over prescribed.
2. Stop over prescribing – simple as that.
3. Understand the warning signs of users.

Read the full article here.

See article for more information.

With the increasingly high costs of prescription medications, many people are turning to the Internet to fill their prescriptions. Internet pharmacies are a hot bed for counterfeit drugs. However, don’t assume you’re safe if you purchase from a brick and mortar pharmacy – counterfeit drugs can make their way into the supply chain anywhere.

Counterfeit drugs are currently a $28 million industry. Don’t let yourself be a victim. Below are some tips that will help.

1. If you take a medication for a chronic condition – save the packaging from the month before and compare the bottle, packaging or the pill itself.

2. If you only receive the pill in a generic bottle compare a picture of the tablet at www.fda.gov by simply searching for the medication.

3. If you are taking a medication and it just doesn’t feel the same or is not working like it normally does, see your doctor and show the medication to your pharmacist.

4. If the medication is deemed counterfeit, save a sample until you see your doctor to make sure there will be no long term complications or side effects.

Healthcare fraud knows no boundaries. The U.S. Medicare and Medicaid programs are equivalent to many government-sponsored programs in other countries. Regardless of country, the existence and roles of players within the healthcare continuum are the same. All healthcare systems have patients, providers, TPAs (third-party administrators) that process reimbursements to third parties, plan sponsors (usually government programs or private-pay activities) and support vendors.

Examples of international healthcare fraud are plentiful. In France, a psychiatric nursing home took advantage of patients to obtain their property. In 2004, a newspaper in South Africa reported “a man who posed as a homeopathic doctor was this week sentenced to 38 years in jail – the stiffest term ever imposed by a South African court on a person stealing from medical aids.” An Australian psychiatrist claimed more than $1 million by writing fake referrals of patients to himself; he also charged for the time spent having intimate relations with patients.

In Japan, as in the United States, there are examples of hospitals incarcerating patients, falsifying records and inflating numbers of doctors and nurses in facilities for profit. A U.K. medical researcher mislead his peers and the public by using his own urine sample for 12 research subjects. Switzerland, know for its watches, had providers sanctioned for billing 30-hour days.

Excerpt from Healthcare Fraud: Auditing & Detection Guide by Rebecca Busch