Professionally exempt nurses & the fee basis of payment.

Within the home health industry, per-visit pay has long been used by agencies to compensate nurses. This "fee-based" system of compensation has been subject to scrutiny by the Department of Labor (DOL), which claims that this is not an appropriate method to compensate professional nurses who would qualify as "exempt" employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Recent court decisions have disagreed with the DOL's position on the issue, but home health agencies need to be careful about employee compensation statutes at both the federal and state level so as not to open themselves up to potentially devastating penalties.