HIGH PLAINS COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTER

Federal Agency: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Federal Program: Consolidated Health Centers Grant AL Numbers: 93.224 and 93.527 Award Period: 1/1/25 - 12/31/25 Type of Finding: Material Weakness in Internal Control over Compliance and Compliance

Criteria or Specific Requirement Per Title 42 Chapter 1 Subchapter D Section 51c303(f), “Health centers must have a schedule of fees or payments for the provision of their health services consistent with locally prevailing rates or charges designed to cover their reasonable costs of operation. They are also required to have a corresponding schedule of discounts applied and adjusted on the basis of the patient’s ability to pay.”

Condition and Context During our testing of 40 sliding fee discounts for health center patients qualifying for reduced charge visits, we identified three visits where the sliding fee discount provided did not agree with the discount that should have been received per the application due to clerical error.

Effect Potential that a patient would not receive the appropriate sliding fee discount.

Questioned Costs None identified.

Cause Clerical error in which the incorrect sliding fee rate was selected and applied due to lack of an oversight process in place.

Recommendation We recommend the Organization to review internal controls in regards to the determination, recording, and monitoring of the sliding fee process to ensure that appropriate sliding fee rates/categories are utilized for each sliding fee encounter.

Views of Responsible Officials We have found that our electronic medical record (eCW) is automatically classifying the federal poverty level (FPL) for all patients no matter if we have their insurance or household income inputted into the system. This has led to some inaccuracies in the rating of their FPL in eCW. We are actively manually overriding this setting, so we will have full control when to run the FPL after patient information is collected.