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On July 20, 2022, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services (“OIG”) issued a special fraud alert (“Alert”) advising “practitioners to exercise caution when entering into arrangements with purported telemedicine companies.” The Alert is only one of four such “special fraud alerts” that the OIG has issued…

The Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”), Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”), recently issued new regulatory guidance relating to covered entities’ HIPAA-compliant use of remote communication technologies for audio-only telehealth services. This guidance is a direct response to a December 2021 Executive Order that tasked HHS with developing HIPAA guidance for telehealth services, with…

The onset of the COVID-19 public health emergency (“PHE”) led to a surge in the use of telehealth by health care providers. In addition, the PHE fueled a boom in the number of direct-to-consumer (“DTC”) telehealth platforms, many of which have relied upon COVID-19 regulatory waivers to launch and operate in multiple states across the…

A variety of conditions may be conspiring against businesses in certain segments of the health care industry.  These include reduced patient census at skilled nursing and other long-term care facilities, COVID regulations that limit the ability of providers to give (or patients to receive) various forms of treatment and patients choosing to delay lucrative elective…

Although the COVID-19 pandemic is still active worldwide, health care industry leaders and regulators have already begun to think about how to implement post-pandemic changes to health care delivery based on lessons learned during the global emergency of the past year and a half. We have reported on some such post-pandemic changes to the health…

As discussed in a prior blog post, in May of this year, the Department of Justice (DOJ), through its Fraud Section and in conjunction with the Center for Program Integrity, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CPI/CMS), began prosecuting defendants who were alleged to have perpetrated a variety of COVID-19-related scams on federal healthcare…

This is the second installment in our series of posts covering recent developments in False Claims Act (“FCA”) doctrine and practice, with the first post discussing the rescission of the “Brand Memo” and restoring the role of sub-regulatory guidance in FCA enforcement actions. A third post, to come later this week, will address recent federal…

The False Claims Act (“FCA”) is a punitive civil statute that acts as the federal government’s primary tool for combatting fraud in government health care programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Tricare. In fiscal year 2020 alone, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) obtained more than $2.2 billion in FCA settlements and judgments (not including potential…

JAMA Internal Medicine recently published an article finding that the number of homebound adults aged 70 or older more than doubled during the last decade. In 2011, approximately 5% of adults aged 70 or older were homebound compared with 13% in the same age group in 2020. The authors indicate the steep incline in 2020…