Healthcare Fraud Lawyer Blog
CareCore National, LLC and the U.S. Department of Justice entered into a settlement agreement, according to a May announcement. CareCore will pay $54 million to resolve a False Claims Act suit based on allegations it fraudulently billed government insurance programs. The business provides pre-authorization/pre-certification services to managed care plans. It determines whether diagnostic testing is medically reasonable and necessary for patients and should be paid for by health insurers. However, the allegations brought by a previous employee stated that CareCore did not follow its protocol and directed nurses to move forward with medical services that were not reviewed or medically necessary. This caused hundreds of thousands of inappropriate and unnecessary diagnostic tests to be approved and billed to Medicare and Medicaid.
Why the Whistleblower Came Forward
CareCore’s previous employee, John Miller, a licensed practical nurse, filed the qui tam suit against the business on behalf of the government. Miller acted as a clinical reviewer for the company and was required to assess whether a medical procedure met certain criteria for being approved. If the service was necessary and appropriate, it would be submitted to the insurance company for payment. Due to the high demand for its services, CareCore could not keep up. In response to the demand, it created the program known as Process As Directed (PAD). Through this program, clinical reviewers like Miller automatically approved prior authorization requests without a physician performing an independent review. This enabled CareCore to return more pre-authorization requests in a shorter period of time. PAD ultimately led to more than 200,000 deceptive authorizations between 2005 and 2013. Medicare and Medicaid paid for many of these unnecessary and fraudulently approved tests.
