Episcopal Ministries Settles False Medicare Claims for $1.3M
Maryland-based Episcopal Ministries to the Aging Inc. (EMA) has agreed to pay $1.3 million to the federal government to settle allegations that the nonprofit knowingly submitted or caused the submission of false claims to Medicare for unreasonable or unnecessary rehabilitation therapy provided by one of its subsidiaries, the U.S. Department of Justice announced earlier this week.
EMA allegedly submitted false claims for rehabilitation therapy at William Hill Manor, a skilled nursing facility EMA owns in Easton, Maryland. EMA hired RehabCare to provide rehabilitation therapy services to its patients at that facility starting in 2010. The government alleges that EMA failed to prevent RehabCare from providing unreasonable or unnecessary therapy to patients in order to increase Medicare reimbursement to the facilities. The government contended that among other things the reported therapy did not reflect the lower amounts of therapy generally provided to patients over the course of their stay.
The settlement further resolves allegations that EMA failed to prevent other RehabCare practices designed to inflate Medicare reimbursement, including: in lieu of using individualized evaluations to determine the level of care most suitable for each patient’s clinical needs, presumptively placing patients in the highest reimbursement level unless it was shown that the patients could not tolerate that amount of therapy; providing the minimum number of minutes of therapy required to bill at the highest reimbursement level while discouraging the provision of therapy in amounts beyond that minimum threshold, despite the Medicare requirement that the amount of care provided be determined by patients’ clinical needs; arbitrarily shifting the number of minutes of planned therapy between therapy disciplines to ensure targeted reimbursement levels were achieved and reporting estimated or rounded minutes instead of reporting the actual minutes of therapy provided.
The False Claims Act allows private parties with knowledge of fraud against the government to sue on behalf of the government and share in the recovery. Had there been a whistleblower in this case, they would have been eligible to receive up to 30 percent of the settlement.
The Chanler Group, in association with the Hirst Law Group, represents whistleblowers who take action under the False Claims Act to report fraud committed against the federal and state governments. We have years of experience representing whistleblower clients who expose every kind of fraud against the government, including health care fraud, contract fraud, and tax fraud. Read more about our expertise in False Claims Act cases and how you can take action.