Our Story
FINANCIAL CONSULTANTS OF ALASKA & WASHINGTON (FCA&W) was founded in 1979 to service the needs of health care clients within the State of Alaska and Washington. Our clients range from the large Acute Care, Critical Access Facility and Long Term Care facilities to the small rural clinics, and Federally Qualified Health Centers. Our clients include Community Health Care Centers, and physician clinics. Many of our clients are Critical Access facilities; we have assisted them with obtaining CAH designation, and have designed feasibility models with impacts for them. We provide a diverse range of Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement services to most of the Alaskan health care organizations and several facilities in Washington, Idaho and Oregon. FCAW is expanding to health care facilities in other states.
We have obtained many special designations and exceptions from Medicare and Medicaid resulting in increased reimbursement to the small rural non-profit and governmental facilities. Our firm stands alone in this unique specialization and the in-depth financial assistance provided to the rural facilities and clinics. In the past several years there has been a high focus on the Medicare and Medicaid Billing Fraud Audits, and our firm has had great success with these billing audits, reducing any paybacks and penalties. The many layers of audits from CMS, Medicare, Medicaid, the intermediaries, and contract audit contractors have made maneuvering through the land mines extremely overwhelming. On a large fraud audit last year where the facility had a demand to pay back $9,000,000, we were able to reduce the payback to zero and eliminated the fraud status on the provider. Our firm has been working on the fraud audits for more than nine years.
Financial Consultants of Alaska & Washington is currently conducting presentations and training sessions that prepares the facility administration, managers, and staff on fraud audit preparedness strategies. FCA&W has developed a fraud audit kit with tips for being proactive, and have listed many or our actual experiences on the auditor’s findings and our turnaround results. We assist our clients with creating an effective work team and design an audit plan that will greatly reduce exposure on the audits. Our staff identifies the OIG key targeted compliance issues, and identifies the problems and process at your facility that may place you as a target on the fraud audits. We work with your Compliance Officer on the audits before records are sent back to the auditors and develop an action plan for the response. We can reduce the burden on your facility’s resources in responding and dealing with the auditors.
Our staff has been very successful in assisting facilities with billing issues. We have worked with the clients to recapture dollars in otherwise lost claims. Our firm represents health care clients on appeals for Medicare and Medicaid. FCA&W’s owner, Donna Herbert has been the expert witness on many appeals over the last 30 years; many of the cases were won for millions of dollars at the Superior Court or Supreme Court level. Our firm prepares all the exhibits, assists the attorneys with legal briefs, and as the expert witness, testifies at the appeals.