A settlement reached to resolve False Claims Act Allegations against Yavapai Regional Medical Center.
The allegations arose by a lawsuit claiming Yavapai Regional Medical Center inflated Medicare payments by incorrectly reporting the amount of hour's hospital employees worked.
On October 4, 2016, the U.S. attorney for Arizona stated that the hospital misreported the average hourly wages it paid employees from 2006 through 2009. Those higher hourly wages prompted Medicare to pay the hospital artificially high reimbursement rates based on an index that took into account many factors including hospital wages.
"Falsifying records and extracting unwarranted funds from Medicare will be detected and stopped," said Christian J. Schrank, Special Agent in Charge for the Los Angeles Region of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General. "Medicare funds are intended to care for patients, not line the pockets of providers who submit false claims."
As a result of Yavapai's false claims, federal health care programs paid substantially more than was warranted.
"As soon as we knew of this allegation on July 20, 2016, we immediately took action and, working collaboratively with the federal government, we were able to quickly reach an agreement in principle to resolve the issue," said Robbie Nicol, a hospital spokeswoman.
The whistleblowers' share of the settlement will be approximately $1.17 million.
