The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General’s (OIG’s) Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT) has garnered headlines for its coordinated Medicare fraud criminal sweeps. However, the team is not just focused on enforcement; since February, HEAT has hosted a series of compliance trainings throughout the country for compliance professionals, healthcare businesses, and in-house counsel.1 On Friday, June 3, OIG posted a video of the Washington, D.C. training on HEAT’s website, http://oig.hhs.gov/heat/. In addition to a video of the complete 3-hour, 45-minute training, OIG will release a series of shorter videos broken down into discrete subject areas so viewers can choose which segments to watch. Presentation slides for the training and 11 related handouts are also available on the HEAT website. These materials offer a valuable tool healthcare organizations can use to develop or deliver internal compliance training and to raise internal awareness of compliance. Compliance professionals will want to ensure that annual and effectiveness review efforts acknowledge these OIG materials as part of any effectiveness review.

Compliance Training Overview

The training, “Take the Initiative: Cultivate a Culture of Compliance with Health Care Laws,”2 features remarks from Inspector General Daniel Levinson, and offers guidance on compliance fundamentals. This is useful information for any healthcare business involved in federal or state healthcare programs. In the training, OIG addresses the following subjects:

- Navigating healthcare fraud and abuse laws

- Compliance program basics

- How to navigate the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and its partners when compliance issues arise

- Healthcare fraud enforcement initiatives

- Effectiveness reviews