A settlement has been reached in a whistleblower class action lawsuit brought against Hospice of the Comforter Inc (HOTCI) who is accused of submitting false claims to the Medicare program for hospice services provided to patients who were not eligible for the Medicare hospice benefit.
The whistleblower's share of the government's settlement recovery has not been determined.
The whistleblower case was filed in August 2012. The government's allegations were that between December 2005 and December 2010, HOTCI engaged in practices that resulted in billing Medicare for patients who were not terminally ill. Specifically, HOTCI allegedly directed its staff to admit all referred patients without regard to whether they were eligible for the Medicare hospice benefit, falsified medical records to make it appear that certain patients were eligible for the benefit when they were not, employed field nurses without hospice training, established procedures to limit physicians’ roles in assessing patients’ terminal status and delayed discharging patients when they became ineligible for the benefit.
