(January 25, 2018): On January 23rd, the Veteran Administration (VA) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a “partnership to strengthen prevention of fraud, waste and abuse.” According to the press release, under this partnership:
“VA plans to capitalize on the advancement in analytics CMS has made by concentrating on its use of advanced technology, statistics and data analytics to improve fraud detection and prevention efforts. Additionally, in November 2017, VA invited industry experts to provide information on the latest commercial sector tools and techniques to enhance VA’s fraud detection capabilities. In April, VA will invite these industry experts to demonstrate their capabilities for detecting and preventing fraud, waste, and abuse and recovering improper payments.”
Among other things, we can expect that the VA will begin to employ techniques utilized by CMS such as predictive analytics to identify instances where providers may be exceeding certain benchmarks in procedures, and to adopt techniques utilized by CMS in the provider enrollment process. The VA may also be looking at outside contractors that also perform functions as UPICs, ZPICs and RACs. This, in turn, means that those providers that serve patients covered by the VA should review their compliance programs and billing and claims processing systems to ensure that they cover adequately VA requirements and procedures, and to ensure that they respond adequately to any investigation or threatened payment denials for those patients.
