'Don't overdo it'

While the Office of Inspector General lays out seven elements for an effective compliance program, Kelly Grahovac, senior consultant at The van Halem Group, says providers should focus on doing a few really well to avoid spreading themselves too thin. HME News spoke to Grahovac, who is co-hosting the Medtrade session, “Your Most Important Profit Center is a Corporate Compliance Program,” about which components to focus on and what mistakes to avoid.

HME News: What are the top three components of an effective compliance plan?

Kelly Grahovac: The components that I find the most useful are training and education, monitoring and auditing, and effective lines of communication.

HME: What’s the No. 1 mistake providers make when developing their program?

Grahovac: The most common mistake I see is that they go too big. Some folks are like, “We need to do a huge number of claims, and we need to do this monthly, and we need to make sure that we're meeting every two weeks with the compliance committee, and every month we're going to tackle five new procedures and policies.” It's like Jan. 1, when everybody starts that diet where you can't eat anything and you say you're going to work out two hours a day, and by the fifth day you're too exhausted and you're starving and you don't do it at all.

HME: How has the pandemic affected compliance?

Grahovac: We actually saw an increase in organizations that wanted to engage in proactive audits and use our clinical team for additional training. We’re still in a bit of an audit reprieve and I think folks are utilizing that time to take a good look at their businesses and ask, “Are we operating as good as we think we are now that we have a minute to take a breath and look around?” So that was an interesting shift that we didn't expect for sure.