Feds: NH hospital to pay $2.2 million settlement - Boston.com

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center will pay more than $2.2 million to settle charges it improperly billed various federal health programs, Vermont's top federal prosecutor said Tuesday.

Of the total, more than $80,000 will go to the state of Vermont, $61,000 to New Hampshire, $1.5 million to the federal government and more than $334,000 will go to Dr. Thomas Prendergast, the former Dartmouth-Hitchcock physician who blew the whistle on the improper billing.

Based in Lebanon, N.H., Dartmouth-Hitchcock is a major teaching hospital affiliated with the Dartmouth Medical School and has a big footprint in northern New England. It discharged more than 13,000 New Hampshire patients in 2010 and nearly 10,000 from Vermont.

Prendergast told authorities the hospital improperly billed federal programs including Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Affairs and the military's Tricare health insurance system for services delivered by resident physicians in training who were unsupervised by more senior attending physicians.

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Sisters accused of health fraud nabbed in Colombia | Reuters

Two sisters accused of falsifying health care claims to defraud the U.S. government of millions of dollars were nabbed in Colombia and returned to the United States, authorities said on Tuesday.

Caridad Guilarte, 54, and Clara Guilarte, 56, ran a clinic in Dearborn, Michigan, that billed about $9 million in claims for treatments patients never received, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website.

The sisters collected more than $4 million from Medicare for drug therapies that were never provided, according to the HHS website.

After the FBI interviewed them, the two sisters fled, said Barbara McQuade, the U.S. attor

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Medical News: Operation Targets $225M in Healthcare Fraud - in Public Health & Policy, Medicare from MedPage Today

By Joyce Frieden, News Editor, MedPage Today Published: February 18, 2011

WASHINGTON -- The largest healthcare fraud operation in U.S. history has nabbed suspects accused of collectively defrauding Medicare of more than $225 million, according to officials from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).

The Medicare Fraud Strike Force charged 111 defendants in nine cities for their alleged participation in Medicare fraud schemes, officials announced on Thursday. Defendants included doctors, nurses, and healthcare company owners and executives, among others.

"With this takedown, we have identified and shut down large-scale fraud schemes operating throughout the country. We have safeguarded precious taxpayer dollars. And we have helped to protect our nation's most essential healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid," said Attorney General Eric Holder in a statement. "As [these] arrests prove, we are waging an aggressive fight against healthcare fraud."

More than 700 law enforcement agents from the FBI, the HHS Office of Inspector General, multiple Medicaid Fraud Control Units, and other state and local law enforcement agencies participated in the operation.

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