One of the nation’s largest specialty wound care providers for nursing home patients has settled a False Claims lawsuit for $45 million, but it continues to reject the allegations of wrongdoing made by the federal government.
The Department of Justice said Friday that Vohra Wound Physicians Management and its founder, Ameet Vohra, MD, submitted claims to Medicare “for medically unnecessary surgical procedures, for more lucrative surgical procedures when only routine non-surgical wound management had been done, and for evaluation and management services that were not billable under Medicare.”
The settlement follows months of back-and-forth between Vohra and the Justice Department, which investigated the company for at least five years.
The department filed its suit in April, arguing that Vohra spearheaded a nationwide scheme to bill Medicare for surgical excisional debridement procedures that were either not medically necessary or had not been performed.
It alleged that Vohra “pressured, trained, and provided financial incentives” for contracted physicians to perform debridement procedures during as many patient visits as possible, regardless of patient need. A press release also accused Vohra of engineering its electronic health record and billing software to ensure that Medicare was always billed for the higher-reimbursed surgical excisional procedure and to create false supportive documentation.
Dr. Vohra and entities named in the settlement said in a statement Monday...
One of the nation’s largest specialty wound care providers for nursing home patients has settled a False Claims lawsuit for $45 million, but it continues to reject the allegations of wrongdoing ma...