Los Angeles, Calif.– November 26, 2007 – Fraudulent medical professionals, those practicing with insufficient or expired qualifications, have been discovered working in hospitals, nursing homes, and other healthcare facilities, posing serious risk to healthcare consumers and resulting in heavy CMS fines for the medical organizations that unknowingly employ them. The unlicensed workers were exposed by a Medicare audit of health claims. As a result, some claims were denied and reimbursements for services refused when investigators learned that care was delivered by professionals with questionable credentials.
“Typically, health plans and hospitals verify credentials only once every two to three years, leaving a wide margin for error,” said Matthew Haddad, an attorney and CEO of Medversant Technologies, a California-based company that developed a revolutionary technology to address the issue of unlicensed practitioners.
Medversant’s OneSource™ - introduced this year - provides a single source for continuous monitoring and automated, real-time physician credentials verification. Hospitals, medical centers, and other healthcare facilities can access up-to-the-minute, accurate information about any provider at any time.
“OneSource changes the paradigm for patient safety,” said Haddad. “Checking licenses and other credentials needs to be continuous to eliminate the scourge of unlicensed medical care in the US.”
According to Haddad, it is impossible to determine from the Medicare audits the extent of the problem, however calculations indicate that if even if as small a number as one percent of healthcare providers in the US do not have an active license, there may be millions of fraudulent medical professionals practicing medicine without valid credentials, clearly a critical situation that threatens the safety of patients, the stability of healthcare facilities, and the integrity of the entire industry.
OneSource continuously monitors the licenses and other important background information of all staff members – physicians, nurses, therapists, and ancillary staff. This process taps all major databases in real time, continuously, and cost effectively. “With Medversant’s One Source solution, healthcare organizations can operate with the confidence that they are offering the highest quality care and safety to their patients,” said Haddad.