The marketing department at City Hospital has been tasked with increasing the sales for City Hospital DME that was just opened 3 months ago and is owned and operated by the hospital. You have been asked to establish a marketing campaign to support the growth of the DME over the next 3 years. The team has decided to utilize an outside vendor to handle all of the marketing activities. The preliminary plan is to provide the marketing company with a list of all patients with the diagnoses of COPD and CHF to begin marketing home oxygen services. The marketing firm is eager to start the calls, so your team is preparing a list of patients that have the target diagnoses and they plan on starting to call the patients in the next few weeks. In the meantime, the marketing company has asked for copies of any verbal or written orders by the physicians of the hospital in the past for home oxygen and they will contact them as well. Your CEO has asked you to prepare the following:

1. What are the requirements of the Social Security Act with regards to telemarketing calls?
2. Would the plan in place be in violation of any federal guidelines? If so, why?
3. If the plan in place would be in violation of any federal guidelines, what will need to be done to become compliant?
4. What are the penalties for any claim that is submitted based on a prohibited solicitation?

https://oig.hhs.gov/documents/special-fraud-alerts/868/fraudalert_telemarketing.pdf