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Mental Health Clinic and Psychiatrist Owner Pay $805,000 to Settle False Claims Act (FCA) Allegations
Thanks to a whistleblower from Connecticut, the patients in the area utilizing psychiatric services will hopefully no longer become unknowing parties to misspending the government’s health budget or of any additional Medicare Fraud or Medicaid Fraud.
United States Attorney John H. Durham and Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen announced May 14 that Dr. Erum Shahab and Waire, LLC, doing business as Ellington Behavioral Health (EBH), have entered into a settlement deal with the government. They agreed to pay $805,071 to resolve allegations that they violated the False Claims Acts.
Shahab is a psychiatrist who also owns the EBH, a psychiatric clinic in Ellington, Connecticut. The clinic treats people with depression and substance abuse. It promises the latest in psychiatric treatment.
In treating patients with substance use disorders, Shahab and the clinic regularly conduct urine drug screening tests on urine samples from their patients. They use a single urine sample to screen for use of multiple classes of drugs. For Medicare, this is considered a single test and billed only once for every patient.
But Shahab and EBH submitted claims to Medicare for multiple units of urine drug screening tests when they knew or should have known that only one unit of service could be billed per patient encounter, the government alleged along with the original whistleblower. Due to EBH’s improper coding of claims, Shahab and EBH received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Medicare program that they were not entitled to receive, the government said in its complaint.
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On top of this, Shahab and EBH also allegedly billed Medicaid for urine drug screening tests even when it did not actually test the urine samples or they tested it weeks or months after collecting the urine samples from the Medicaid beneficiaries.
The $805,071 settlement deal between the government and Shahab and EBH covers claims they submitted to the Medicare program from January 1, 2011 to September 30, 2013, and claims submitted to the Medicaid program from January 1, 2014 to June 30, 2014.
As the relator, Dr. David Simon, a former employee at EBH, will receive a share of the proceeds in the form of a whistleblower award amounting to $99,113. He filed his complaint in the U.S. District Court in Connecticut under the qui tam, or whistleblower, provisions of the both the federal and state False Claims Acts.
The whistleblower provisions of both the federal and state False Claims Acts provide that the whistleblower or relator is entitled to receive a portion of the proceeds of any judgment or settlement recovered by the government.
“Physicians and their medical practices must carefully code their claims, honestly bill for services, and ensure that taxpayers’ health care dollars are properly spent,” said U.S. Attorney Durham.
In 2012 and 2014, Dr. Shahab has also been reprimanded and fined by the government, in these cases allegedly due to improper handling of addictive drugs.
If, like whistleblower Dr. Simon, you suspect that a health care fraud is happening, call to speak with our whistleblower law firm toll free (877) 561-0000.