Category Archives: Medicaid Appeals
Family Practice Doctors: Is It CPT 1995 or 1997 Guidance?
Right now, CMS allows physicians to pick to follow the 1995 or 1997 guidelines for determining whether an evaluation and management (“e/m”) visit qualifies for a 99214 versus a 99213. The biggest difference between the two policies is that the 1995 guideline allows you to check by systems, rather than individual organs. Starting January 1, 2023, there are a lot of revisions, including a 2021 guidance that will be used. But, for dates of service before 2021, physicians can pick between 1995 and 1997 guidance.
Why is this an issue?
If you are a family practitioner and get audited by Medicare, Medicaid, or private pay, you better be sure that your auditor audits with the right policy.
According to CPT, 99214 is indicated for an “office or other outpatient visit for the evaluation and management of an established patient, which requires at least two of these three key components: a detailed history, a detailed examination and medical decision making of moderate complexity.”
Think 99214 in any of the following situations:
- If the patient has a new complaint with a potential for significant morbidity if untreated or misdiagnosed,
- If the patient has three or more old problems,
- If the patient has a new problem that requires a prescription,
- If the patient has three stable problems that require medication refills, or one stable problem and one inadequately controlled problem that requires medication refills or adjustments.
The above is simplified and shorthand, so read the 1995 and 1997 guidance carefully.
An insurance company audited a client of mine and clearly used the 1997 guidance. On the audit report, the 1997 guidance was checked as being used. In fact, according to the audit report, the auditors used BOTH the 1997 and 1995 guidance, which, logically, would make a harder, more stringent standard for a 99214 than using one policy.
Now the insurance company claims my client owes money. However, if the insurance company merely applied the 1995 guidance only, then, we believe, that he wouldn’t owe a dime. Now he has to hire me, defend himself to the insurance company, and possibly litigate if the insurance company stands its ground.
Sadly, the above story is not an anomaly. I see auditors misapply policies by using the wrong years all the time, almost daily. Always appeal. Never roll over.
Sometimes it is a smart decision to hire an independent expert to verify that the physician is right, and the auditors are wrong. If the audit is extrapolated, then it is wise to hire an expert statistician. See blog. And blog. The extrapolation rules were recently revised…well, in the last two or three years, so be sure you know the rules, as well. See blog.
Celebrating Christmas With an Audit, I mean, a Root Canal
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah! I wanted to thank all my readers for TEN YEARS of this blog! Can you believe it has been 10 years? I started this blog in 2012, and the year is about to turn to 2023!! I going into my 11th year of blogging about Medicare and Medicaid regulatory compliance litigation. Whew! I tell you what: being a full-time attorney, a part-time blogger, mom, and wife is tiring! Try it. You’ll see. Try it for 10 years!
I am so proud to have created a career out of defending health care providers across the country, from HI to AL to NY to FL and everywhere in between.
My birthday is January 7th, right after Christmas and New Year’s Day. I am one year closer to getting Medicare (I cannot wait), but since I rely on private pay health insurance, I am giving myself a special Christmas present to end the year and “wind-down” the health spending plan. I will be undergoing a root canal tomorrow, the 21st of December.
Root canals are not fun. In fact, they remind me of undergoing a Medicare and/or Medicaid audit. No one wants them done, but you got to do it.
I suggest conducting self audits regularly, especially now with the Public Health Emergency (PHE) ending at some point.
Self Audits
The first step for a medical practice or organization is to select the timeframe that will be reviewed during the audit. The timeframe should be large enough to produce meaningful results. For example, in its OIG Data Brief, the OIG looked at a year’s worth of data, from March 1, 2020, through February 28, 2021. There are some key dates and regulations that practices or organizations need to consider when selecting the timeframe. These include:
- January 31, 2020: HHS announced the COVID-19 PHE, which was determined to have existed since January 27, 2020.
- March 27, 2020: The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act was signed into law.
- March 31, 2020: CMS’ “Policy and Regulatory Revisions in Response to the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency” became effective.
So many changes to Medicare and Medicaid rules and regulations were implemented during COVID. Some changes will continue after PHE ends and some will not.
Now more so than ever, putting your own facility through a thorough self-audit is imperative. You need to understand the policy changes pertinent to your health care service type and dates the changes occurred and when applicable. Before the “REAL” auditors come knocking on your facility’s door, prepare yourself. Consider hiring an attorney or medical compliance expert to conduct the self audit.
The next step in performing a self-audit is for the practice or organization to select a category of service to review. If the practice or organization provides multiple types of services, the focus should be on one category, such as office visits, for review. When reviewing office visit services, the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes applicable to telehealth visits include, but are not limited to, Office or Other Outpatient Services (99201-99205 [new patient] and 99211-99215 [established patient]) and Non-Face-to-Face Telephone Services (99441-99443 [practitioners who may report E/M services] and 98966-98968 [practitioners who cannot bill independently]). Practitioners who cannot bill independently are qualified non-physician health care professionals, such as social workers, clinical psychologists, and certain therapists. Please note, CPT code 99201 was deleted effective January 1, 2021.
Looking forward to 2023 after my root canal…Cheers!
A Story of Three Medicaid Providers’ Erroneous Terminations
I have a story for you today that affected three, Medicaid, behavioral health care providers back in 2013. Instead of me spouting off legal jargon that no one understands, I am going to tell you a nonfictional story.
Since both stories occurred in NC, we will use DHHS, the Department of Health and Human Services, which is the acronym for NC’s Medicaid agency.
In 2013, a Residential Level IV facility was shut down overnight by the managed care organization (“MCO”), Alliance, which was one of many MCOs that managed all behavioral health care for NC Medicaid recipients within their respective, catchment areas. The facility, we will call Alpha, housed 5-6, at-risk, teenage, African American, males, who could not reside in their family’s home due to mental illness, substance abuse, legal trouble, and/or violence. The owners of Alpha, themselves were large, muscular, African American males, which, I can only imagine, was to their benefit.
Alliance terminated Alpha from its catchment area, but since Alpha only provided Medicaid services in Alliance’s catchment area, Alliance’s decision would close a business immediately, terminate all staff, cause the owners to lose their careers, and the residents would have no home.
Alpha hired me. We were successful in obtaining an injunction. Click on “injunction” to read my blog about this exact situation in 2013, written by me in 2013. I have written numerous blogs on the topic of erroneous terminations of Medicaid providers over the years. Here are a couple: blog and blog.
An Administrative Law Judge (“ALJ”) ruled in our favor that Alliance does not have the legal authority to terminate a provider for no reason or any erroneous reason. The ALJ Stayed the termination and Ordered Alliance to reverse the termination and continue to contract with Alpha.
Whew! We thought. Then, Alliance flat-out ignored the ALJ’s Order.
We brought a Motion for Contempt and/or Sanctions; however, we were instructed, at the time, that a Writ of Mandamus was the appropriate venue in Superior Court. This too was unsuccessful.
During our legal battle for Alpha, we were successful in obtaining injunctions for two other provider also terminated without cause.
Alpha did close. But the bright side of the story is what happened in the future. Those 3 injunctions, which were ignored by MCOs to the detriment of the three providers, were the last ones to be ignored. In the years that followed, OAH ALJs routinely held MCOs accountable for erroneous terminations and without cause terminations.
My team has witnessed successful injunctions across the country that protect providers from arbitrary and capricious terminations. We have litigated many of these successful injunctions.
District Court Upholds ALJ’s Decision that Extrapolation Was Conducted in Error
Today, I am going to write about a hospital in Tennessee that underwent an audit, and the MAC determined that the hospital owed over $5 million. The hospital challenged both the OIG contractor’s sampling methodology and its determinations on specific claims by requesting a hearing before an ALJ. The District Court decision was published in September 2022. The reason that I want to make you aware of this case, is because there have been numerous Medicare provider appeals unsuccessfully challenging the extrapolation, and the ALJs upholding the extrapolations. In this case, the ALJ found the extrapolation in error, the Council reversed the ALJ on its own motion, and the district court reaffirmed the ALJ, saying the extrapolation was faulty. Whenever good case law is published, we want to analyze the Court’s reasoning so we, as attorneys, can replicate the winning arguments.
One of the main reasons that the district court agreed that the extrapolation was faulty was because no testimony supporting the OIG contractor’s extrapolation process or the implementation of its statistical sampling methodology were submitted to that hearing on June 11, 2020, and the contractor did not appear. It’s the mundane scene with an ALJ level appeal and the auditor failing to appear to prove the audit’s veracity. See blog.
In addition to finding that additional claims satisfied Medicare coverage & payment requirements, the ALJ also found that OIG’s statistical extrapolation process did not comply with § 1893 of the Social Security Act, nor with the MPIM’s guidance on statistical extrapolation.
The ALJ held that HHS policy requires that the OIG’s audit must be able to be recreated and that as the audit’s sampling frame utilized data from outside of the audit, the audit could not be recreated.
The Council subsequently reviewed the ALJ’s decision on its own motion and reversed that decision in part, finding that the ALJ’s determination that the sampling process was invalid was an error of law. The Council then concluded that the OIG contractor’s statistical extrapolation met all applicable Medicare legal and regulatory requirements.
The hospital appealed to the federal district court. The district court’s review consists of determining whether, in light of the record as a whole, the Secretary’s determination is supported by “substantial evidence.”
According to the Court, the hospital amply demonstrated that the Council did not have the authority to overturn the decision of the ALJ on own-motion review. Accordingly, the hospital’s Motion for Summary Judgement was GRANTED and the extrapolation was thrown out.
Are UTIs Preventable? OIG Says Yes and CMS Will Audit!
I hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving and are now moving toward the Christmas or Hanukkah holiday. As I discussed last week, CMS and its contracted auditors are turning their watchdog eyes toward nursing homes, critical access hospitals (“CAHs”), and acute care hospitals (“ACHs”). You can hear more on this topic on Thursday, December 8th at 1:30 when I present the RACMonitor webinar, “Warning for Acute Care Hospitals: You Are a Target for Overpayment Audits.”
October 2022, OIG published a new audit project entitled, “Potentially Preventable Hospitalizations of Medicare-Eligible Skilled Nursing Facility Residents.”
Residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities are frequently transferred to an Emergency Department as an inpatient when they need acute medical care. A proportion of these transfers may be considered inappropriate and may be avoidable, says OIG.
OIG identified nursing facilities with high rates of Medicaid resident transfers to hospitals for urinary tract infections (“UTIs”). OIG describes UTIs as being “often preventable and treatable in the nursing facility setting without requiring hospitalization.” A 2019 OIG audit found that nursing facilities often did not provide UTI detection and prevention services in accordance with resident’s individualized plan of care, which increases the chances for infection and hospitalization. Each resident should have their own prevention policy for whatever they are prone to get. My Grandma, for example, is prone to UTIs, so her personal POC should have prevention measures for trying to avoid contracting a UTI, such as drinking cranberry juice and routine cleansing. In addition to UTIs, OIG noted that previous CMS studies found that five conditions were related to 78% of the resident transfers to hospitals: pneumonia, congestive heart failure, UTIs, dehydration, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease/asthma. OIG added a sixth condition citing that sepsis is considered a preventable condition when the underlying cause of sepsis is preventable. In my humble opinion, the only condition listed as preventable that is actually preventable is dehydration.
OIG’s new audit project involved a review of Medicare and Medicaid claims related to inpatient hospitalizations of nursing home residents with any of the six conditions noted previously. The audit will focus on whether the nursing homes being audited provided services to residents in accordance with the residents’ care plans and related professional standards (or whether the nursing homes caused preventable inpatient admissions due to non-compliance with care plans and professional standards).
What can you do to prepare for these upcoming audits? Review your facilities’ policies, procedures, and practices germane to the identification of the 6 conditions OIG flagged as preventable. Ensure that your policies and procedures lay out definitive steps to prevent or try to prevent these afflictions. Educate and train your staff of detection, prevention, treatment, and care planning related to the six conditions. Collect and analyze data of trends of frequency and cause of inpatient hospitalizations and determine whether these inpatient hospitalizations could have been prevented and how.
In summary, be prepared for audits of inpatient hospitalizations with explanations of attempted prevention. You cannot prevent all afflictions, but you can have policies in place to try. As always, it’s the thought that counts, as long as, it’s written down.
Questions Answered about RAC Provider Audits
Today I’m going to answer a few inquiries about recovery audit contractor (“RAC”) audits from providers. A question that I get often is: “Do I have to submit the same medical records to my Medicare Administrative Contractor (“MAC”) that I submit to a RAC for an audit?” The answer is “No.” Providers are not required to submit medical records to the MAC if submitted to a RAC, but doing so is encouraged by most MACs. There is no requirement that you submit to the MAC what you submit to RACs. This makes sense because the MACs and the RACs have disparate job duties. One of the MACs, Palmetto, instructs providers to send records sent to a RAC directly to the Palmetto GBA Appeals Department. Why send the records for a RAC audit to a MAC appeals department? Are they forecasting your intentions? The instruction is nonsensical unless ulterior motives exist.
RAC audits are separate from mundane MAC issues. They are distinct. Quite frankly, your MAC shouldn’t even be aware of your audit. (Why is it their business?) Yet, many times I see the MACs cc-ed on correspondence. Often, I feel like it’s a conspiracy – and you’re not invited. You get audited, and everyone is notified. It’s as if you are guilty before any trial.
I also get this question for appeals – “Do I need to send the medical records again? I already sent them for the initial review. Why do I need to send the same documents for appeal?” I get it – making copies of medical records is time-consuming. It also costs money. Paper and ink don’t grow on trees. The answer is “Yes.” This may come as a shock, but sometimes documents are misplaced or lost. Auditors are humans, and mistakes occur. Just like, providers are humans, and 100% Medicare regulatory compliance is not required…people make mistakes; those mistakes shouldn’t cause financial ruin.
“Do the results of a RAC audit get sent to your MAC?” The answer is “Yes.” Penalties penalize you in the future. You have to disclose penalties, and the auditors can and will use the information against you. The more penalties you have paid in the past clear demonstrate that you suffer from abhorrent billing practices.
In fact, Medicare post-payment audits are estimated to have risen over 900 percent over the last five years. Medicare provider audits take money from providers and give to the auditors. If you are an auditor, you uncover bad results or you aren’t good at your job.
Politicians see audits as a financial win and a plus for their platform. Reducing fraud, waste, and abuse is a fantastic platform. Everyone gets on board, and votes increase.
Appealing your RAC audits is essential, but you have to understand that you won’t get a fair deal. The Medicare provider appeals process is an uphill battle for providers. And your MACs will be informed.
The first two levels, redeterminations and reconsiderations are, basically, rubber-stamps on the first determination.
The third level is the before an administrative law judge (ALJ), and is the first appeal level that is before an independent tribunal.
Moving to the False Claims Act, which is the ugly step-sister to regulatory non-compliance and overpayments. The government and qui tam relators filed 801 new cases in 2022. That number is down from the unprecedented heights reached in 2020 (when there were a record 922 new FCA cases), but is consistent with the pace otherwise set over the past decade, reflecting the upward trend in FCA activity by qui tam relators and the government since the 2009 amendments to the statute.
See the chart below for reference:
Auditing Medicare Advantage Organizations – About Time!
The American Hospital Association (“AHA”) is asking the Department of Justice (DOJ) to look into health insurance companies that routinely deny patients access to care and payments to providers. I’d like a task force as well. This is exactly the problem I have witnessed with managed care organizations or MCOs. In traditional Medicare and Medicaid, MCOs are prepaid and make profit by denying consumers medical care, terminating provider contracts, and not paying providers for care rendered. Congress created the same scenario with Medicare Advantage. Individuals can elect coverage through private insurance plans. While MA has been wildly successful and popular, the AHA is complaining that too many people are getting denied services.
An OIG report that was published in April cites MAOs as denying services for beneficiaries. We are always talking about providers getting audited, it is about time that the companies that are gateways for providers getting reimbursed and beneficiaries getting medically necessary services are likewise audited for denying services. It seems ironic that providers are audited for potentially billing for too many services and these gateway, third party reimbursement companies are audited for providing too few services – or denying too many prior authorizations. But if the MCO or MAO deny medical services, then the money that would have been paid to the provider stays in their pocket.
The OIG report found that many MAOs delay or deny services despite those services meeting Medicare prior authorization criteria, approximately 13-18%. Almost a 20% wrongful denial rate. When these MAOs get tax payer money for a Medicare beneficiary and deny services those tax dollars stay in the MAO’s pockets.
Supposedly MAOs approve the vast majority of requests for services and payment, they issue millions of denials each year, and OIG’s audit of MAOs has highlighted widespread and persistent problems related to inappropriate denials of services and payment. As enrollment in Medicare Advantage continues to grow, MAOs play an increasingly critical role in ensuring that Medicare beneficiaries have access to medically necessary covered services and that providers are reimbursed appropriately.
According to the OIG report, MAOs denied prior authorization and payment requests that met Medicare coverage rules by: (1) using MAO clinical criteria that are not contained in Medicare coverage rules; (2) requesting unnecessary documentation; and (3) making manual review errors and system errors.
Personally, I am fed up with these private, insurance companies denying services and keeping our tax dollars. It is about time the insurance companies are audited.
Medicare Investigations for False Claims Act Violations
Whenever you receive correspondence with letterhead from the Department of Justice, Attorney General’s office, you know it’s important and you better take note.
A Civil or Criminal Investigative Demand is serious. Getting any communication from the U.S. Department of Justice can be a bit unnerving. That’s particularly true for Medicare and Medicaid providers receiving a Civil Investigative Demand (“CID”) for documents and testimony.
A CID is a tool used by the Justice Department (“DOJ”) to investigate potential violations of the False Claims Act (“FCA”). See blog. The DOJ can issue a CID whenever the DOJ has “reason to believe that any person may be in possession, custody, or control of any documentary material or information relevant to a false claims law investigation.” The bottom line is that the DOJ uses CIDs to obtain documents and identify potential witnesses so they can bring FCA suits against the recipient or others.
What is the False Claims Act anyway?
It’s a broad statute that punishes many things, one of which is making false statements to the government in connection with a claim for payment from the government. The DOJ often uses CIDs to investigate medical providers who seek payment from Medicare and Medicaid.
Just because the Investigative Demand is labeled “civil” does not mean that the investigation is only civil; it could take a turn towards criminal. In other words, something sparked the DOJ’s attention, but, perhaps there were no allegations of criminal action, the investigation could start and the investigator could uncover something they consider criminal. An investigation earmarked as civil can turn criminal with the uncovering of one document.
On the other hand, the investigator could review all the documents and conclude that there is not even a civil violation. Very rarely, do the investigators contact you to tell you that the investigation is over and no violation was found. Most of the time, you are put on notice that you are being investigated, then hear nothing from the investigator in perpetuity.
Recently, I had an investigator inform me that the review of. my client was complete, and the file was being closed. But that’s the only time in 22 years that I was informed that nothing noncompliant was found. Usually, time just passes.
If you are found to have violated the FCA, the government can triple the amount of penalties, so the numbers get very high very quickly.
The Justice Department obtained more than $5.6 billion in settlements and judgments from civil cases involving fraud and false claims against the government in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2021. This is the second largest annual total in False Claims Act history, and the largest since 2014. Settlement and judgments since 1986, when Congress substantially strengthened the civil False Claims Act, now total more than $70 billion.
A much lesser known provision of the FCA is the reverse one. Not to blow everyones’ minds, but there is also a “reverse false claims” provision of the False Claims Act. The reverse false claims provision permits the government or relators to pursue defendants who are alleged to have hidden or reduced an obligation to pay the government through false statements, or who have violated the 60-day payment rule’s obligation to return “identified overpayments.” These claims typically have been raised in the context of cost reporting, Medicare Part C, or related to alleged failures to fulfill obligations under the 60-day payment rule. The government and relators have increasingly relied on the reverse false claims provision to support stand-alone claims or have used it in conjunction with affirmative false claims. However, because the reverse false claims provision is very lightly used compared to affirmative false claims provisions, there is a dearth of case law defining it or exploring its parameters. The case law that does exist is primarily from district courts and, as the survey of case law contained herein illustrates, there is little guidance from the Circuit Courts or the U.S. Supreme Court.
Intent or deliberate disregard is required to prove the false claims act – reverse and regular.
Failure to respond to a CID completely could warrant criminal contempt. This is especially important to note, as civil investigate demand sounds much less important than a subpoena. But a CID is, in essence, a subpoena. Immediately, implement a “legal hold” upon receipt of the CID, and don’t forget to avoid producing privileged documents.
After the investigation is complete, if there are violations of the FCA uncovered, you will receive correspondence that states in “all-caps” and bold font:
Rule 408 FOR SETTLEMENT PURPOSES ONLY
FRE 408 prohibits the use of settlement negotiations as evidence. After reviewing the offer, get with your legal counsel to discuss next steps.
Despite State Statute – Perhaps You Can Appeal Medicaid Prepayment Review!
It’s hard enough to be one of the providers to accept Medicare and Medicaid. The regulatory oversight is burdensome. You are always getting metaphorically yelled at for upcoding or bundling. See blog, thanking providers.
One of the absolute, most-Draconian penalty against a Medicare or Medicaid provider is prepayment review.
Prepayment review is exactly as it sounds. Before you receive payment – for services rendered – an auditor reviews your claims to determine whether you should be reimbursed. Prepayment review is the epitome of being guilty until proven innocent. It flies in the face of American due process. However, no one has legally fought its Constitutionality. Yet many provider-companies have been put out of business by it.
Generally, to get off prepayment review, you have to achieve a 75% or 80% success rate for three consecutive months. It doesn’t sound hard until your auditors – or graders – fail to do their job correctly and fail you erroneously.
Usually, when a provider is placed on prepayment review, I say, “Well, you cannot appeal being placed on prepayment review, but we can get a preliminary injunction to Stay the withhold of reimbursements during the process.” It tends to work.
Most State statutes have language like this:
“(f) The decision to place or maintain a provider on prepayment claims review does not constitute a contested case under Chapter 150B of the General Statutes. A provider may not appeal or otherwise contest a decision of the Department to place a provider on prepayment review.”
However, in a recent case, Halikierra Community Services, LLC v. NCDHHS, the provider disputed being placed on prepayment review and accused NCDHHS of a malicious campaign against it.
Halikierra was the largest, in-home, Medicaid health care provider and it alleged that 2 specific, individuals at DHHS “personally detested” Halikierra because of its size. As an aside, I hear this all the time. I hear that the auditors or government have personal vendettas against certain providers. Good for Halikierra for calling them out!
According to the opinion, these 2 DHHS employees schemed to get Halikierra on prepayment review by accusing it of employing felons, which is not illegal. (Just ask Dave’s Killer Bread). Halikierra sued based on substantive due process and equal protection rights, but not before being forced to terminate its 600 employees and closing its doors because of being placed on prepayment review. It also asserted a claim of conspiracy in restraint of trade under NCG.S. §75-1 against the individual DHHS employees.
The Court held that “[t]he mere fact that an agency action is nonreviewable under the Administrative Procedure Act does not shield it from judicial review.” The upshot? Even if a statute states that you cannot appeal being placed on prepayment review, you can sue for that very determination.
FYI – This case was filed in the Industrial Commission, which has jurisdiction for negligence conducted by the state agencies. Exhaustion of administrative remedies was not necessary because, per the state statute, being placed on prepayment review does not constitute a contested case in administrative court.
