Bill Dombi, AGG Healthcare senior counsel, was featured in a Hospice News Q&A about the legal challenges currently facing the hospice space.
Bill explained his new goals following his departure from the National Association for Home Care & Hospice, where he spent nearly four decades, but maintained his passion for homecare advocacy.
He added that energy levels around hospice are currently at an “all-time high,” in terms of both public awareness and utilization of services, as well as newfound respect as an industry. This evolution of hospice’s public image includes both positives and negatives, which regulators and oversight bodies are not afraid to question.
“It’s a yin and yang of those things that keep hospices up at night and also wake them up in the morning,” Bill said. “It’s seeing the promise of hospice care being realized, and seeing the greater focus on an expansion in the definition of palliative services as being exciting, positive things coming about.”
The Special Focus Program, although recently suspended by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, was created to monitor quality of care in hospices. Bill went on to explain what kinds of red flags can get a hospice in trouble from a legal perspective, including oversight of standard rules and regulations.
Specifically, Bill pointed out self-auditing, correct documentation, and efficient management as basic ways for hospices to stay on track.
“It’s about going back to the basics,” Bill said. “What we have found not just in hospice, but also in home health is that too many people don’t go back to the basics . . . sometimes there’s issues in what gets passed down from one generation of staff to another.”
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- Bill A. Dombi
Senior Counsel
