HID Global, a worldwide leader in secure identity solutions, today announced that its HID Trusted Tag Services™ meets the EVV requirements for home health agencies enacted by several states as a condition of Medicaid participation. HID’s trusted tags provide indisputable “proof of presence” of the caregiver in the patient’s home, thereby eliminating the opportunity to falsify records to support fraudulent claims.
Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements for home-based care in excess of $31 billion and a booming home health industry that is expected to reach a value of $150.8 billion by 2018 have given rise to a multi-billion dollar fraud problem for public and private insurers. One of the most common fraudulent activities is submission of claims for payment on services that were never provided, a situation exacerbated by manual verification processes that make it easy to falsify records pertaining to the presence of a caregiver at a patient’s home.
To eliminate fraudulent claims, a several state Medicaid programs now require home health agencies to implement EVV systems to prove that a caregiver was physically present in the patient’s home for the required length of time. While some states mandate the use of specific EVV equipment, others simply require EVV systems that meet minimum technical and functional standards.
“HID Trusted Tags satisfy these requirements by leveraging the near ubiquitous nature of NFC-enabled mobile devices to enable a highly secure EVV system that is both easy to use and impossible to defraud,” said Marc Bielmann, vice president of Identification Technologies with HID Global. “Our patented tag technology optimizes security and convenience, eliminating the need for special equipment to read tags or for users to modify their mobile device or download apps.”
Tamper-proof tags are attached to or embedded into an object inside the patient’s home in such a way that they cannot surreptitiously be removed or altered. When the caregiver arrives, they tap the object with their NFC-enabled device to communicate secure information to HID Global’s cloud-based authentication platform. The data read from a trusted tag has security and privacy attributes that change on every tap, providing an indisputable and auditable EVV record for home health agencies to use for billing and reimbursement.
“HID Trusted Tag Services also integrates seamlessly into most clinical and administrative management software systems, which means agencies can continue to use the systems that most closely meet their unique needs,” said Bielmann. “In addition to sparing the expense associated with system upgrades or replacement, easy integration means data collected at the point of care can be transmitted back to the agency in real-time for faster and more accurate claims processing and advanced analytics.”
