Financial Crime Weekly: Hospice provider fined $26.3M for false Covid claims

Financial Crime Weekly: Hospice provider fined $26.3M for false Covid claims 
Benzinga; by Michael Julian; 7/28/24 
Provista Health, a Dallas-based hospice provider, has been ordered to pay $26.3 million for billing Medicare for a variety of medically unnecessary respiratory pathogen panel (RPP) tests that were given to nursing homes during the pandemic, the Department of Justice announced on Thursday. ... In a July 2023 complaint, the U.S. alleged that the RPP tests were not medically necessary because the beneficiaries had no symptoms of a respiratory illness and because the tests were for uncommon respiratory pathogens. The complaint also alleged that Britton-Harr and Provista submitted claims for RPP tests that were never ordered by physicians and sometimes for RPP tests that were never performed, including over 300 claims for nasal swab test samples that were supposedly collected from beneficiaries who had already died.