Boston Heart settles kickback allegations with $26.7M payment
Boston Heart Diagnostics of Framingham, Mass., agreed on Dec. 9 to pay $26.67 million to resolve False Claims Act allegations suggesting it paid for patient referrals and improperly billed federal programs for lab testing, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced.
Boston Heart was accused of violating both the Anti-Kickback Statute and the Stark Law, legislation put in place to prohibit providers from offering or paying for referrals of federally funded services or billing Medicare and Medicaid for certain services referred by physicians with financial ties to laboratories. Allegations against Boston Heart were filed under the whistleblower provision of the False Claims Act, and whistleblowers Chris Riedel and Claudia Bradshaw will receive around $4.36 million of the settlement.
Allegations against Boston Heart included the company providing practices with in-office dieticians in exchange for physician referrals for lab testing; directly or indirectly paying processing and handling fees and waiving copayments and deductibles; conspiring with others to pay doctors kickbacks disguised as investment returns; and conspiring with certain hospitals in Texas to submit claims for outpatient laboratory testing for patients who weren’t hospital outpatients in an effort to receive higher reimbursements from federal programs.
The civil settlement is the result of an investigation by entities from across the U.S., including the U.S. Attorney’s Offices for the Eastern District of California, the Eastern District of Texas and the District of Columbia.
“This office will continue to take all appropriate action to prevent improper inducements that can corrupt the integrity of physician decision-making,” Scott said in a statement.
After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington with a bachelor’s in journalism, Anicka joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering cardiology. Close to her heart is long-form journalism, Pilot G-2 pens, dark chocolate and her dog Harper Lee.