N.C. and IBM team up to ferret out Medicaid fraud

Gov. Bev Perdue announced an effort Wednesday to track down Medicaid fraud by creating a partnership with IBM to discover abuses by patients and their health care providers.

IBM will use its software to comb through the records of 60,000 health care providers and 2 million North Carolinians who are insured through the federal program for the poor and disabled.

"It is pretty evident to us that we have to do more to root out the waste and crack down on the people that we know are out there who are abusing the system," Perdue said at a news conference at Rex Healthcare, where she stood in front of cardiac catheterization monitors.

The governor said the project with IBM would be combined with other efforts, including a new state legislative proposal to toughen laws against kickbacks to health care providers, a publicity campaign to get people to report fraud and efforts to secure money to hire more anti-fraud investigators.

Perdue said that Medicaid was a valuable program but that in these difficult financial times, it was even more important that taxpayers were not being ripped off.

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