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Perform and Improve as Needed

By Patricia Trites MPA, CHBC; with Staff Reporters 

www.HealthcareFinancials.com

There are several types of compliance audits that a medical practice, clinic or healthcare organization might need to perform. The starting point, discussed elsewhere on this ME-P, is to obtain a baseline audit. The next step is periodic audits or reviews that are performed after information is obtained from the baseline audit.

Periodic Audits

Periodic audits are performed on an on-going basis. Depending on the volume of billing, these may occur weekly for a large multi-specialty ambulatory clinic to quarterly for a small medical practice. These periodic audits can be random or scheduled. Sometimes in the process of seeing how things run, a surprise review can be informative to staff and practitioners.

New Employee Audits

New employees require regular training and reviews until there is confidence in their capabilities. Background checks are often helpful to find out whether there are any potential conflicts. In hospitals, health plan offices, surgery centers, and other regulated facilities, background checks are a normal part of the credentialing process. This process typically includes Medicare violations, which would show up on the National Practitioner Data Bank report. However, independent medical practices do not have access to this type of information and may have to rely on other organizations to obtain the information. The OIG and the General Services Administration both maintain a database of excluded persons and entities that can be accessed through the Internet. As part of the organization’s initial and periodic audits, queries of these two databases should be performed for all employees and independent contractors (like locum tenens physicians). Failure to do so can put the practice at risk of large civil money penalties ($10,000 for each occurrence) and liability for refunds of all claims the excluded individual had part in providing or billing.

Assessment

Additional audits can be performed whenever new employees are added, or if there are complaints or issues that arise in the course of business; prn.

Conclusion

And so, your thoughts and comments on this Medical Executive-Post are appreciated? What interesting, informative or strange tidbits have you uncovered in your auditing processes?

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Filed under: "Doctors Only", Career Development, Ethics, Managed Care, Practice Management, Risk Management | Tagged: audits, baseline audit, compliance, david marcinko, GSA, HMO, hope hetico, locum tenens, medicare, Medicare Advantage, Medicare audits, medicare billing, Medicare compliance audit, medicare compliance audits, Medicare HMOs, Medicare plans, National Practitioner Data Bank, new employee audit, OIG, Patricia Trites, www.healthcarefinancials.com, www.healthdictionaryseries.com | Leave a comment »