Home Health & Hospice Week

Don't fall for these common cons.

From companies offering "certified" HIPAA training to those masquerading as state-contracted HIPAA service providers, scammers are preying on the innocent in order to stuff their wallets full of your cash. Knowing how to respond to these solicitations will save you big. Here's a potentially thorny situation: A home care provider receives a call from an organization claiming to be under contract to a state agency to provide HIPAA training. The caller says the provider is required to attend a HIPAA training seminar next month, but the provider isn't familiar either with the solicitor or the state agency the caller claims to represent. No, it's not a hypothetical situation - this did occur. Fortunately the health care provider had the sense to contact its outside counsel to make sure it wasn't being hoodwinked, but this sort of solicitation is happening all the time. "There are a lot of companies out there offering 'HIPAA-certified' training programs or claiming that they'll certify you as HIPAA-compliant, while some will offer to 'certify' trainers to teach HIPAA," says Gretchen McBeath, an attorney in the Columbus, OH office of Bricker & Eckler. Any of these solicitations could easily be bogus, she warns. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently warned some trade associations to be on the lookout for companies that are attempting to perform HIPAA cons. CMS said the company would ask for a person by name, advise that person that a HIPAA seminar was taking place at a certain hotel in or near their area, and would aggressively assert that the provider must attend the seminar and that attendance was mandatory. The fee was $200 if a credit card number was provided immediately, but increased to $400 if they wished to pay at the door. While the seminar may or may not have been legitimate, don't be fooled if this happens to you and be sure to report this information to your CMS regional office. In addition to CMS' awareness of such schemes, the HHS Office of Inspector General says there have been scores of reported HIPAA and Medicaid scams perpetrated this year. A group called Doctor's Assistance Corp. "uses strong sales tactics" and has "made misrepresentations by telephone that their seminars are accredited by the Office for Civil Rights," says OIG spokesperson Judy Holtz. Furthermore, she says, "DAC employees have threatened providers that, in order to be fully HIPAA-compliant, they must attend the DAC seminars." One of DAC's tactics is to call up individuals and say they must attend HIPAA seminars, reports OIG senior counsel Caryn Gordon. They aggressively seek credit card information over the phone and "they use such tactics as telling you the fourth [...]