Washington, DC (PRWEB) May 21, 2014
Anxiety about compliance with CMS requirements for provider-based entities is running high, as hospitals face audits and the future of the supplemental reimbursement hangs in the balance. And some hospitals share provider-based space with a separate freestanding clinic that does not have the special CMS designation, which can be very risky, as the May 19 issue of Atlantic Information Services’s, Inc.’s Report on Medicare Compliance (RMC) explains.
Provider-based status is available for hospital-owned entities that are located outside the hospital’s four walls, but very specific CMS requirements must be met. The benefit of declaring provider-based status is financial; hospitals collect both a facility fee and a professional fee for services. While CMS doesn’t grant provider-based status in advance, hospitals can submit attestations of their compliance to CMS. They may be audited at any time, whether or not they self-attest, with recoupment a possibility if the provider-based entities are out of compliance in any way.
“It is easy to fall out of compliance because it is fairly technical,” said Debi Weatherford, executive director of internal audit at Piedmont Healthcare, a health system in Atlanta. “If CMS comes to audit, the chance of losing provider-based status is pretty high.”
One CMS regional office, for example, recovered a hospital’s Medicare payments for provider-based services back to the date it had attested its compliance with provider-based status, according to a letter obtained by RMC. A major reason for the recoupment was the hospital’s use of shared space. “A facility that shares space with a freestanding facility cannot have provider-based status as a department of a hospital,” the regional office says. Its reasons can be summed up as the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
Visit http://aishealth.com/archive/rmc051914-02 to read the article in its entirety, which includes considerations for hospitals whose provider-based entities are part of the 340B drug discount program.
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