By Michael Saunders


The Administration on Aging, also known as AoA, is a federal government agency operating within the United States Department of Health and Human Services that's generally responsible for ensuring the well-being of older Americans in their independent communities through the provision of grants and support programs sanctioned by the Congress in the Older Americans Act.

The grants and programs of the AoA are all designed to make a contribution to the realization of its main agency mission which is to "develop a comprehensive, coordinated and cost-effective system of home and community-based services that helps elderly people maintain their health and self-reliance in their homes and communities."

In accordance with this mission, the Administration on Aging has recently established the Health Care Fraud Program Expansion and Senior Medical Patrol Capacity Building Grants in an attempt to boost the capacity of the Senior Medicare Patrol (SMP) programme to reach more Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, their families and caregivers, while concentrating on fraud prevention and identification.

The Senior Medicare Patrol Programme has been running for at least 10 years and has regularly received funding from the AoA. Each SMP grantee operates a state-wide program with maximum funding of $180,000 every year provided by Older Americans Act funds.

The funds received by the grantees will be utilized to support the training and mobilization of senior volunteers who provide client education to beneficiaries. One of the primary objectives of the client education initiatives that are covered under the program is the significance of medicare fraud prevention.

With this, The SMP Programme tries to enable the elderly through increased awareness and understanding of health care programs that would protect them from the economic and health-related implications connected with Medicare and Medicaid fraud, error, and abuse.

Essentially, the program announcement not only proposes to increase awareness of Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries of health care fraud prevention, identification and reporting through expansion of SMP programme capacity; it also seeks to develop and implement new innovations in fraud education by expanding cooperative efforts with law enforcement partners, CMS and other associations with an indisputable record of medicare fraud prevention.

To support these initiatives, the AoA is ready to administer funds in the amount of $7.3 million.

The establishments and setups who will be presumed eligible to submit an application under this program are the following:

a) Existing SMP grantees from California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, New York, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico, and Georgia.




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