Medicare funding isn’t the only thing hospital executives have to worry about with last month’s passage of the federal Deficit Reduction Act.
Some little-known parts of the legislation now are coming to light.
One requires states to pass false-claims, or whistleblower, laws. The other would make hospitals that get more than $5 million in Medicaid funding to retrain workers, vendors, agents and contractors on state and federal whistleblower laws and healthcare fraud.
The new law is set to go into effect Jan. 1 and will make voluntary compliance mandatory, something that national hospital trade groups have fretted about in terms of money and execution beyond the nominal costs of preparing training manuals for employees and corporate policies.
But for other hospitals, it won’t necessarily require a big effort, according to Sheryl Vacca, Deloitte LLC’s national healthcare compliance practice director who is based in Costa Mesa.
“Most of our hospital clients are in the vein of having voluntary compliance programs anyway,” Vacca said.
But “there’s going to have to be some revisions” with the new law, Vacca said.
Some 60% of hospitals in California are aware of compliance issues and are doing some sort of program, according to Vacca.
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St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton: hospitals would have to retrain workers |
Having voluntary compliance isn’t necessarily tied to a hospital’s size, she said. Small to midsize hospitals often have voluntary programs in place, Vacca said.
The deficit law is expected to prod the 35 states that don’t have false-claims laws to pass them. States that have false-claims acts, such as California, share in a higher percentage of Medicaid fraud recoveries than those that don’t.
More than $16 billion has been recovered from the federal False Claims Act since 1986.
The law also requires the Department of Health and Human Services to create a Medicaid integrity program oversight board to expand federal efforts to strengthen fraud enforcement and oversight of Medicaid.
Meanwhile, Taxpayers against Fraud, a whistleblower advocacy group that was a backer of the Deficit Reduction Act, told industry magazine Modern Healthcare that 80% of all of the federal false-claims’ act cases were in healthcare and that compliance was a necessity.
b>$1M for Research
Advanced Medical Optics Inc., Santa Ana, said it’s pledging $1 million to support lenticular science, which combines aspects of traditional and laser-aided eye surgery.
The American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery Foundation is doing the research. The foundation is doing “a substantial multiyear program to support new research and new educational programs that explore the rapidly emerging science of refractive lenticular surgery,” chairman Dr. I. Howard Fine said.
The foundation, based in Fairfax, Va., funds eye research, public education and charitable activities in developing countries.
b>IntraLase Sells to Institutes
IntraLase Corp. of Irvine unveiled statistics showing its lasers are gaining usage among eye surgeons that do laser eye procedures at teaching institutes.
Eighteen institutions bought IntraLase’s FS laser, including the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at University of Miami, Duke University and Stanford University.
Lasers from IntraLase take the place of a blade in some eye surgeries. The company made its announcement along with launching a fourth-generation laser. The company unveiled the new laser last week, at the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery’s annual meeting in San Francisco.
b>Bits and Pieces:
InSight Health Corp., Lake Forest, completed its acquisition of East Bay Medical Imaging, San Ramon, earlier this month for an undisclosed price. The center provides diagnostic medical imaging, specifically magnetic resonance imaging Dr. Richard Afable, chief executive of Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, presents “Partners or Competitors: Physician-Hospital Relationships in the 21st Century” at the April 13 meeting of the Orange County Employee Benefit Council. The meeting is at the Beckman Center on the University of California, Irvine campus Re-searchers at UC Irvine said they identified the first known case of a “new memory syndrome” in a 40-year-old woman who has the ability to perfectly and instantly recall details of her past. Researchers said it could open new avenues of research in the study of learning and memory.
