MIAMI – VirtuOx has agreed to pay $3.15 million to resolve allegations that it submitted or caused to be submitted false claims to Medicare for reimbursement, according to an announcement from the Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Florida.
The Coral Springs, Fla.-based company, which operates Medicare-approved Independent Diagnostic Testing Facilities (IDTFs), allegedly violated the False Claims Act by falsely identifying the place of service for certain services it performed to obtain a higher rate of reimbursement from Medicare from January 2016 to December 2020. In particular, the company allegedly knowingly submitted false claims to Medicare identifying its IDTF located in San Francisco as the location of service for overnight pulse oximetry tests when no services were performed at that location in relation to the overnight oximetry claims.
The company allegedly also administered overnight pulse oximetry tests and, at times, also billed Medicare for single determination pulse oximetry tests – commonly referred to as an oxygen “spot check” – for the same patient when the only test performed was the overnight test.
As part of the settlement, VirtuOx entered into a five-year Corporate Integrity Agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General, that requires, among other things, that the company retain an outside expert to perform annual claims reviews that address the place of service identified...
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