The OIG has released its March 2015 “Compendium of Unimplemented Recommendations,” which highlights the OIG’s top 25 recommendations for cost savings and/or quality improvements in HHS programs, along with other significant unimplemented recommendations. High-priority recommendations address the following areas, among others:

  • Payment Policies and Practices: Expand the DRG window to include additional days prior to the inpatient admission and other hospital ownership arrangements; establish a hospital transfer payment policy for early discharges to hospice care; and reduce hospital outpatient department payment rates for ambulatory surgical center-approved procedures.
  • Billing and Payment: Develop oversight mechanisms for the home health face-to-face requirement; change the method for determining how much therapy is needed to ensure appropriate skilled nursing facility payments; detect and recoup improper Medicare payments made for services rendered to incarcerated beneficiaries; implement an automated system to recalculate outlier claims to facilitate reconciliations; and provide states with definitive guidance for calculating the federal upper payment limit (UPL), including using facility-specific UPLs that are based on actual cost report data.
  • Contractor Oversight: Utilize and report Zone Program Integrity Contractors’ (ZPICs’) workload statistics in ZPIC evaluations.
  • Grants and Contracts: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) should promulgate regulations addressing institutional financial conflict of interest.
  • Program and Financial Management: Reduce significant variation in states’ personal care services laws and regulations; and standardize administrative law judge level case files and make them electronic.
  • Quality of Care and Safety: Broaden patient safety efforts to include all types of adverse events; require states to report on vision and hearing screening data; strengthen oversight of state access standards for Medicaid managed care; and expand regulatory authority and oversight of dietary supplements.
  • Emergency Preparedness: Establish effective hospital emergency preparedness and response policies.
  • Health Information Technology: Improve the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System; and address fraud vulnerabilities in EHRs.
  • Program Integrity: Increase reviews of clinicians associated with high cumulative payments; and restrict certain beneficiaries to a limited number of pharmacies or prescribers.
  • Affordable Care Act: Improve internal CMS controls related to determining applicants’ eligibility for enrollment in quality health plans and eligibility for insurance affordability programs.

While some of these recommendations could be achieved administratively, other policies would require legislative changes to implement.