Certification mills
Posted by Patti on August 24th, 2007 / Print This Post
Trouble with some NY State Home Health Aide Training schools:
ALBANY, Aug. 23 — Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced guilty pleas on Thursday from the former operators of two schools for home health aides who sold state certifications to hundreds of people who never received proper training.The pleas, which were agreed to in May and July, stemmed from an investigation by the attorney general’s office into the rapidly growing — but relatively lightly regulated — field of home health care.
In a statement, Mr. Cuomo’s office described the two schools as “certification mills” linked to what he called a widespread and elaborate scheme to defraud Medicaid of millions of dollars in billings for federally subsidized home health care. Both schools were licensed by the state.
Earlier this week, Mr. Cuomo announced the convictions of 10 people who had illegally billed Medicaid for work as home health aides using the tainted certificates, some of them obtained from the schools involved in Thursday’s announcement, and in some cases claiming to have worked for more than 24 hours a day.
He has issued subpoenas to dozens of the state-certified agencies that hire aides and bill Medicaid for their services, to determine whether any of them have been involved in such fraud.
The (non) aides involved with these cases are not innocent. They have been convicted as well:
Under state law, home health aides, who may administer medication, dress wounds and perform some other procedures, must go through 75 hours of training at a school and 16 hours of practical training with a registered nurse.Schools must be licensed by the Department of Health or the Department of Education to administer certification tests for their students.
Because there is no central registry of those certifications, state officials do not know how many people are working as home health aides in New York.
Several of the home health aides convicted earlier this week received their documents from On Time Home Care Agency or Smalls Training and Counseling School.
This could be much bigger than it appears right now. What caliber of person would pay for a certificate and go to work as a Home Health Aide, with ZERO training?
September 5th, 2007 at 9:15 am
It needs to be better regulated- the home health care business. This is taking advantage of consumers as well as those who want to serve them. I have to ask too, how many of those who got the fake certificates are US citizens? Immigrants are very vulnerable to this sort of thing. I don’t think they should be punished.