Regulators have placed a heightened focus on hospice in recent years as increasing utilization drives up health care costs. As anti-kickback and fraud cases proliferate in the industry, keeping a close eye on legal and regulatory compliance — including marketing tactics and spending — will be key for hospice providers.
Improper marketing activities present a red flag for regulators and can lead to significant financial penalties, exclusion from participation in federal and state programs and even jail time, according to Rachel Hold-Weiss, associate attorney and partner at law firm Arent Fox. Hold-Weiss focuses on health care regulatory, transactional and litigation matters in the post-acute care arena.
Keeping a close eye on compliance in marketing methods and associated spending is critical to identifying problematic areas and solutions, Hold-Weiss told Hospice News.
“Often marketing is divorced from compliance and it’s not brought in, but the compliance part is so critical,” Hold-Weiss told Hospice News. “There are types of marketing activities that are problematic. If your marketers are handing things out, somebody needs to be watching it, somebody needs to be tracking it, somebody needs to be on top of it. Not from the financial and business side, but from the patients and regulatory side. If you have the compliance oversight of that, then there’s a better chance that somebody will pick up an activity that may be problematic sooner rather than later.”
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