Ankita Singh, 42, formerly of Maumee, Ohio, was sentenced to 26 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary for her role in a durable medical equipment scheme that defrauded the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Medicare Program.
She was also ordered to pay restitution for $4,470,931.02, serve two years of supervised release, and pay a special assessment fee of $600.
On February 29, 2024, a jury found Singh guilty of six counts of healthcare fraud for signing false orders for orthotic braces that patients never requested and did not need as part of a DME scheme.
Beginning in 2019, Singh worked as an independent contractor for at least two companies to purportedly provide “telehealth services” and was paid a fee to conduct patient consultations. The consultations never took place.
Telemarketers would cold call Medicare beneficiaries and tell them that orthotic braces would be provided at no cost. The beneficiaries were not previously Singh’s patients, and she had never spoken to them. Singh never saw them in person and did not conduct a telehealth visit.
The telemarketers would prepare orders with the beneficiaries’ names, Medicare numbers, and purported diagnoses to support a false diagnosis that the braces were medically necessary. Orders were then electronically sent to Singh to affix her signature, certify that she was treating the Medicare beneficiary, and affirm that the brace was medically necessary.
Singh signed more than 11,000 prescriptions for orthotic braces for approximately 3,000 Medicare beneficiaries with whom she had no patient-physician relationship and frequently ordered multiple braces for each patient without ever having examined them.
As a result of Singh’s false orders, Medicare was billed more than $8 million for orthotic devices that were not medically necessary. Medicare paid approximately $4.47 million in claims for the fraudulent prescriptions that Singh signed.
