Hospice Owner Convicted

A federal jury convicted Shiva Akula of health care fraud related to fraudulent claims billed to Medicare. Akula owned and oversaw the day-to-day operations of hospice facility Canon Healthcare LLC. He overbilled for hospice patients for General Inpatient (GIP) services to fraudulently maximize reimbursement, causing Medicare to pay approximately $600 more per patient, per day, for multiple months, than it would have for the appropriate level of care. Many of the patients whose claims were fraudulently billed to Medicare were not hospice eligible. Read a story from NOLA  and a Department of Justice press release.

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