Ransomware cyber attacks have been a prominent threat to the healthcare industry. In this case, First Choice Dental, a large dental practice with multiple locations across Wisconsin, was targeted by hackers in October 2023. The hackers gained access to sensitive information including patient names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, passport numbers, driver’s license numbers…

In October, two medical transportation companies were charged with or indicted for fraud in New York.   

The owner of Pearl Transit Corp. (“Pearl”), Jael Watts, was accused of running a sham transportation service that supposedly provided rides for persons with disabilities and seniors in Westchester, Putnam, Rockland, and Suffolk counties. In 2024, the…

The New York Attorney General’s Office imposition of a $250,000 penalty on MVP Health Care for maintaining an inaccurate mental health provider directory riddled with “ghost” providers was recently discussed here. The problem, however, extends beyond New York. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General (OIG) recently issued a…

Sligo Creek Center, a Maryland nursing home, recently appealed the constitutionality of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) enforcing a $1.5 million fine without a jury trial. The fine related to the facility’s failure to establish and maintain an infection control program. The appeal, currently pending in the Fourth Circuit of the…

The New York Office of the Medicaid Inspector General (OMIG) publishes audit protocols to “assist the Medicaid provider community in developing programs to evaluate compliance with Medicaid requirements under federal and state statutory and regulatory law.”1 Such protocols are “applied to a specific provider type or category of service in the course of an…

As of September 30, several temporary Medicare telehealth flexibilities that were put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic officially came to an end. One of the most significant changes involves the site requirement for telehealth services. Medicare beneficiaries can now only receive telehealth services other than behavioral or mental health services from specific originating sites…

A company that runs five nursing homes in Delaware recently agreed to pay a $182,000 fine to settle an investigation for alleged HIPAA violations. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) investigated the company, referred to collectively as the Cadia Healthcare Facilities, after it received a complaint that the…

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced on August 21 that Niranjan Mittal, a Brooklyn-based cardiologist, was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison. Mittal pleaded guilty to violating the federal Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS) in connection with a fraudulent scheme that lasted roughly seven years and resulted in over $40…

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General (OIG) has issued a favorable Advisory Opinion for a non-profit foundation receiving donations from an affiliated company. The company in this case offers family-based therapy for children with a redacted “Disorder” (presumably autism), where the goal of the therapy sessions is to train…

New York’s Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP) has long been the subject of enforcement at the New York State Attorney General’s Office (AG). Many of those enforcement actions involve caregivers who billed Medicaid for CDPAP services never provided but sometimes also implicate agencies that are responsible for processing caregiver payments and protecting against fraud.…