Earlier this month, a toxicology lab doing business as Precision Diagnostics agreed to pay $27 million to resolve allegations raised by three whistleblowers under the False Claims Act that it charged Medicare and Medicaid for medically unnecessary urine drug tests and also paid kickbacks to get testing referrals.
To overbill Medicare, the complaint alleges, Precision Diagnostics used “custom profiles,” which acted as functional standing orders that led doctors to order a wide array of urine testing without assessing individual needs. Many of these tests were expensive and alleged to be medically unnecessary.
Urine drug testing has been a focus of U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) enforcement efforts recently, including as a part of treatment of the opioid epidemic, which has proven to be especially vulnerable to various types of healthcare fraud. Put differently, and channeling David Glaser, Monitor Monday’s punster-in-chief, DOJ resolutions of whistleblower-initiated allegations of urine testing fraud have been coming at a steady stream.
Earlier this year, Labtox agreed to pay $10.4 million to settle similar allegations, with two of its executives going to prison, including one for nearly four years. In 2021, Colorado-based laboratory Cordant Health Solutions paid nearly $1 million to resolve similar allegations, and Nevada Advanced Pain Specialists, a Reno-based medical practice, paid $1 million for allegedly medically unnecessary urine drug testing. In 2023, a drug...
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