From HealthPayerIntelligence, Victoria Bailey:
- Cigna’s recent brush with False Claims Act violations serves as a reminder that Medicare Advantage organizations should be routinely assessing their risk and compliance activities.
- The United States alleged that Cigna submitted inaccurate and untruthful patient diagnosis data to receive additional payments from CMS and did not withdraw the inaccurate data or repay CMS.
- Cigna submitted the diagnoses to CMS even though they were not supported by information documented on the vendors’ forms, nor were they reported to Cigna by other healthcare providers who saw the patient during the year the home visits occurred.
- Medicare Advantage is a top priority for the government when it comes to detecting fraud.
- Medicare Advantage plans should focus on risk mitigation assessments to avoid similar situations:
- ensure your documentation looks good. Make sure if you’re doing these retrospective reviews of patient charts, you’re not just adding codes, but also making sure that if any of the codes needed to be downgraded, you’re deleting those extra codes
- look at their data and imagine how it would appear to an objective third party. Plans should ensure they are identifying the correct codes and that any in-home assessments are complete.
- conduct annual risk assessments and other monitoring.
- All Medicare Advantage organizations would benefit from proactively assessing their data on a routine basis. Some organizations may be able to monitor their documentation and conduct risk adjustments with their current staff. However, partnering with outside companies may be helpful for others.