"Physical therapy is not a subspecialty of the medical profession and physical therapists are not medical doctors; we are a separate profession that provides a unique service that physicians are unable and untrained to provide."

Letter to the AMA from the APTA, Dec 2009

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Home Health Care Submits $432 Million in Improper Medicare Claims

Home health agencies submitted 22 percent of claims in error for unnecessary medical services or for incorrect coding in 2008.

That adds up to $432 million in improper Medicare payments, according to an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report released Tuesday.
Of those, home health agencies upcoded about 10 percent ($278 million) of claims.

Home health agencies did not submit required Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) data for 6 percent of the claims in 2009, which represented more than $1 billion in Medicare payments, according to another OIG report.

Read Fierce Healthcare's report on Home Health care fraud and abuse here.

Get the March 2012 Office of the Inspector General Report (OIG) report on Home Health fraud and abuse here.

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Tim Richardson, PT owns a private practice at Medical Arts Rehabilitation, Inc in Palmetto, Florida. The clinic website is at MedicalArtsRehab.com.

Bulletproof Expert Systems: Clinical Decision Support for Physical Therapists in the Outpatient Setting is a manager's workbook with stories, checklists, charts, graphs, tables, and templates describing how you can use paper-based or computerized tools to improve your clinic's Medicare compliance, process adherence and patient outcomes.

Tim has implemented a computerized Clinical Decision Support (CDS) system in his clinic since 2006 that serves as a Reminder, Alerting, Prompting and Predicting CDS using evidence-based tests and measures.

Tim can be reached at
TimRichPT@BulletproofPT.com .

"Make Decisions like Doctors"


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