A settlement has been reached to resolve False Claims Act allegations against AMI Monitoring Inc, also known as Spectocor, its owner, Joseph Bogdan, Medi-Lynx Cardiac Monitoring LLC, and Medicalgorithmics SA, the current majority owner of Medi-Lynx Cardiac Monitoring LLC.
The allegations arose from a lawsuit that claimed AMI Monitoring Inc, aka Spectocor, Joseph Bogdan, Medi-Lynx Cardiac Monitoring LLC, and Medicalgorithmics SA billed Medicare for higher and more expensive levels of cardiac monitoring services than requested by the ordering physicians.
According to the government, from 2011 through 2016, Spectocor, headquartered in McKinney, Texas, and Joseph Bogdan, allegedly marketed the Pocket ECG as capable of performing three separate types of cardiac monitoring services—holter, event, and telemetry. When a physician sought to enroll a patient for Pocket ECG, however, the enrollment process allegedly only allowed the physician to enroll in Pocket ECG for the service which provided the highest rate of reimbursement provided by a patient’s insurance, thus steering the ordering physician to a more costly level of service. In 2013, Medi-Lynx, a related company headquartered in Plano, Texas, began selling the Pocket ECG and allegedly adopted this same enrollment procedure. Medicalgorithmics SA, a limited liability company based in Warsaw, Poland, acquired a controlling interest in Medi-Lynx in September 2016.
“Billing for unneeded services, as the government alleged, takes unfair advantage of Medicare patients and steals from taxpayers,” said Special Agent in Charge Scott J. Lampert for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG). “OIG, along with our law enforcement partners, will aggressively investigate these crimes.”
Under the agreement, Spectocor and Bogdan will pay $10.56 million and Medi-Lynx and Medicalgorithmics will pay $2.89 million.
The whistleblower, Eben Steele, former Spector sales manager who blew the whistle on the companies, will receive about $2.4 million from the settlements.
