ACO Oversight by CMS Questioned by OIG

No one is free from audits. Even auditors get audited.

When the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) audits auditors, however, the auditors get recommendations for changes, not the million-dollar penalties that healthcare providers receive.

In September 2020, OIG released an audit report of the Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). There were 472 ACOs in America as of 2017, per the report. To those ACOs that were not audited for this September 2020 OIG report, expect audits to come. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has instructed the Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs), Comprehensive Error Rate Testing (CERT) auditors, Unified Program Integrity Contractors (UPICs), and Recovery Audit Contractors (RACs) to audit ACOs.

These audits for monetary penalties will be dissimilar from audits by OIG, which wielded recommendations. ACOs are large entities: groups of doctors, hospitals, and other providers that come together to give coordinated high-quality care to Medicare beneficiaries.

In 2017, ACOs served approximately 9 million beneficiaries under the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP). Of all the ACOs, 159 were eligible for shared savings payments, and received approximately $799 million. Of the remaining ACOs, 11 were liable for shared losses, and 302 were neither eligible to receive shared savings payments nor liable for shared losses, because they generally did not reduce healthcare costs (or they chose not to participate).

OIG found weaknesses in the oversight of ACOs, which are required to report data on 31 quality measures through three methods of submission:

• A patient experience-of-care survey (eight measures);
• Claims and administrative data (eight measures); and
• The designated CMS web portal (15 measures).

For the September 2020 OIG Report, 159 ACOs were required to select a CMS-certified vendor of their choice. You can learn more about this by listening to my recent webcast: “SNFs & COVID-19: New Audits Coming Soon.”

These CMS-certified vendors would contact the ACOs’ patients for a survey or poll, kind of like the follow-up surveys that you get after a seminar. Sometimes the students rating the teachers marks the best truth-teller of effectiveness.

The patient survey reported eight points of quality measures to CMS on the ACOs’ behalf. The vendors collected the data through mail and telephone surveys. The auditors would mail a questionnaire, and if that went unanswered, they would place a follow-up telephone call.

Twelve auditors conducted the 2017 audit of the ACOs’ patients. They surveyed approximately 400,000 beneficiaries and reported all patient survey data for those who responded.

Prior to 2019, non-medical home care agencies did not have a role in the Medicare Advantage (MA) landscape. After a variety of policy chances, they now have an opportunity to contract with MA plans through two major pathways.

The OIG report found the following weaknesses in CMS’s supervision of ACOs:

• CMS did not ensure that its contractor provided feedback reports in time to enable survey vendors to include and evaluate quality assurance plans regarding all of the changes implemented to address issues identified.
• CMS did not ensure that its contractor reviewed survey instruments translated into other languages.

OIG recommended that CMS increase supervision to confirm changes and collect client feedback. It is my opinion that ACO audits will increase.

Programming Note: Knicole Emanuel, Esq. is a permanent panelist on Monitor Mondays. Listen to her RAC Report every Monday at 10 a.m. EST.