On June 25, 2014, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a Special Fraud Alert entitled "Laboratory Payments to Referring Physicians." While the Alert breaks no new ground (see, e.g., its 1994 Special Fraud Alert), it demonstrates the OIG's continuing concerns about clinical laboratories' offering inducements to referring physicians.
The Alert provides an in-depth discussion of laboratories' paying referring physicians for collecting specimens and paying physicians for submitting patient data to a registry or database. The Alert explains that physicians who prepare specimens for transfer from the office to a laboratory have a CPT code (99000) to bill Medicare for a nominal charge. Where laboratories are separately paying the same physician for specimen collection, the double billing is evidence to the OIG of an obvious intent to induce referrals. Similarly, with respect to physicians submitting patient data for a database, even if the project has legitimate underpinnings, it may still be illegal if an intent is to induce referral. The Alert contains a detailed list of characteristics of specimen processing and data registry arrangements that it finds suspect.
The OIG 's concerns are not lessened in referral arrangements that "carve out" Medicare and other federal programs and focus only on commercial insurance. The OIG takes the position that, because physicians refer to a limited number of labs, inducements with respect to commercial insurance are likely intended to induce Medicare referrals also. Equally important, inducements for commercial insurance referrals may violate applicable state laws (for example, Florida's Patient Brokering law).
Physicians should review their financial arrangements with outside clinical labs. The question to be asked always is whether one of the reasons for the arrangement is to induce referrals of patients for lab services. Although the Alert focuses on specimen processing and data registry arrangements, that does not mean that other arrangements are OK. The fraud and abuse concerns set forth in the Alert extend to any arrangement that provides some sort of financial benefit to physicians with the intent to induce referrals of patients for lab services.
Following publication of the Alert, the OIG published a study entitled "Questionable Billing for Medicare Part B Clinical Laboratory Services." In the Study, the OIG found that "[a]lmost half of the labs that exceeded the thresholds for five or more measures of questionable billing—compared to 13 percent of all labs—were located in California and Florida, areas known to be vulnerable to Medicare fraud." The OIG's recommended that it "[r]eview the labs identified as having questionable billing and take appropriate action" and also "[r]eview existing program integrity strategies to determine whether these strategies are effectively identifying program vulnerabilities associated with lab services." As a result, clinical labs and physicians should exercise great vigilance in reviewing their financial and referral relationships with each other to insure that they comply with applicable federal (and state) fraud and abuse and other healthcare laws.
