In an update to a July 21, 2023, story, laboratory owner Patrick Britton-Harr was convicted of five counts of healthcare fraud and one count of transactional money laundering. Read a Department of Justice press release.
The Justice Department has filed a complaint against Patrick Britton-Harr and multiple laboratory companies he owned alleging False Claims Act violations for submitting claims to Medicare for laboratory tests that were not ordered by healthcare providers, not medically necessary, and sometimes never performed. According to the complaint, his company Provista Health LLC as well as multiple other corporate entities allegedly sought to profit from the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic by offering COVID-19 tests to nursing homes as a way to bill Medicare for a wide array of medically unnecessary respiratory pathogen panel (RPP) tests. The complaint also alleges that Britton-Harr and Provista Health submitted claims for RPP tests that were never ordered by physicians and that more than 300 claims were for tests collected after beneficiaries had died. Read a story from the Business Observer and a Department of Justice press release.