Amedisys’s woes continue

Amedisys shares tumble 23% on earnings drop, Market Watch

Kudos to Sam Antar for the warning on this stock! - Ilene 

Recall:

Open Letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission: Investigate Troubling Issues at Amedisys Missed by Wall Street Journal

Courtesy of Sam Antar of White Collar Crime 

To Securities and Exchange Commission Chairperson Mary Schapiro:

On June 30, 2010, Amedisys AMED announced that it "received notice of a formal investigation from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) pertaining to the company, and received a subpoena for documents relating to the matters under review by the Senate Finance Committee." The SEC investigation follows an April 2010 Wall Street Journal report questioning Amedisys’s Medicare reimbursement patterns and raising serious questions about possible abuse by the company of Medicare’s reimbursement system. In mid-June 2010, several class action lawsuits were filed against Amedisys alleging securities fraud, based on the Wall Street Journal report.

In my analysis below, I will provide additional troubling data and issues missed in the Wall Street Journal report and not cited in the various class action lawsuits for the SEC to consider in its investigation.

Background

The analysis is based entirely on information derived from Amedisys’s public disclosures in various reports filed with the SEC. Those reports provide certain statistical information about Medicare episodic, non-Medicare episodic, and non-Medicare/non-episodic home health care visits, admissions, and recertifications for each reporting period.

Amedisys further categorizes that data by base/start-up entities and acquired entities for each reporting report. Amedisys defines Base/Start-up agencies as agencies that were originally opened by the company and acquired entities owned by the company for at least a year.

Therefore, the analysis below is based almost entirelry on Amedisys’s statistical data for base/start-up agencies to provide a consistent apple-to apples comparison of the data.

Note: Download entire work sheet here (formatted for legal sized paper).

What explains the sudden increase in the growth of in base/startup Medicare episodic visits per admission?

Prior to Q2 2007, Amedisys reported fairly typical (i.e., moderate) growth in visits per Medicare episode. For example, during 2006, the number of visits per Medicare admission for base/start-up agencies increased to 29.4 visits per admission from 28 visits per admission in 2005, or a 2.2% increase over the previous comparable period. See the chart below:

Similarly, in Q1 2007, base/start-up Medicare episodic visits per admission declined to 29.1 visits per admission compared to 29.4 visits per admission in Q1 2006 or a 1.2 decrease from the previous year comparable period. See the chart below:

Starting in Q2 2007, however, the amount of base/start-up Medicare episodic…