HQAA Blog

Compliance Programs

Posted by Steve DeGenaro on Wed, Oct 05, 2022 @ 10:44 AM

In our January 2022 blog, we talked about fraud, waste, and abuse and touched on compliance programs. The article prompted questions and comments from quite a few organizations and questions of late suggest it might be a good time to do a deeper dive on compliance programs.

Compliance “programs” are sets of policies & procedures specifically designed to help an organization adhere to law and regulation. These policies and procedures are specifically set up to detect, prevent, and correct fraud, waste, and abuse. Medicare requires any provider to have such a program and they have very specific content they want these policies to contain.

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Topics: Security, Billing, HQAA Accreditation, Compliance, Avoiding Deficiencies, Complaint Process, Business Practices, Marketing, Surveys, OIG

Background Checks

Posted by Steve DeGenaro on Fri, Feb 11, 2022 @ 02:58 PM

The pandemic has changed how we look at employment in the United States in a multitude of ways. Many of us now “telecommute” to work, which opens up the opportunity to live farther from the office than ever before. Young people have new and different considerations and priorities when it comes to accepting a job. And of course, there’s the fact that it is increasingly more difficult to recruit and retain good long-term employees. Complicating these issues specifically in our industry are the pesky and sometimes misunderstood background check requirements.

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Topics: Quality, Security, HQAA Accreditation, HME Accreditation Requirements, Compliance, Showroom, Retail, Delivery, Competence, OIG

The OIG & DME

Posted by Steve DeGenaro on Wed, Jan 19, 2022 @ 09:56 AM

Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of DME owners, managers, and staff more than the Office of the Inspector General (the “OIG”). The fear is perhaps deserved by an extremely small handful of industry people. The vast majority of our industry rank and file have nothing to fear from this sometimes maligned and misunderstood government agency.

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Topics: Billing, HQAA Accreditation, HME Accreditation Requirements, Compliance, Avoiding Deficiencies, CMS, Business Practices, OIG