For those of you who pick up your clients and your pay check at the same time on pay days, we have been asked to insist that you pick up your pay check before you ask to have your client paged to the front desk. Please do not approach the front desk and sign your client out before you've made it through the pay check line. There are two reasons for this:
1. This causes clients to congregate in the dining room to wait on you unattended by an instructor, which compromises their care. The receptionist cannot be responsible for watching the clients and still perform her duties at the front desk. In addition, the congestion in the dining room in the afternoons is already bad enough with extra staff in the building and buses loading at the same time. Your client should not be paged or signed out until you are ready to walk out the door with him or her.
2. This causes an overlap in billing that can potentially be viewed as fraudulent. The moment a Waiver employee signs a client out of the Civitan Center billing through Adult Services stops and Waiver billing starts. If you enter the Civitan Center, have your client paged, and then immediately get into the pay check line while your client waits for you, we are technically falsifying Waiver billing because you are not working with your client during that time.
On the other hand, if you don't sign them out yet still leave them sitting at the front waiting for you to make it through the pay check line, Adult Services is still billing Medicaid for that time even though the client is not in class. It doesn't matter if this only represents a few minutes--fraud is fraud whether it's 5 minutes or a full hour. Once again, your client should not leave his or her classroom until you are ready to walk out the door. If in doubt please remember that if someone must wait it must be you and never your client.
Effective immediately, the receptionist will be fully
empowered to insist that you pick up your check before she agrees to page your
client from the classroom. Please remember that she is following orders and do
not complain or verbally abuse her for following this procedure.
Thank you for complying with this request--it serves to keep us all out of trouble with our auditors!
