U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary sentenced Ankita Singh, 42, formerly of Maumee, Ohio, to 26 months in prison for her role in a durable medical equipment (DME) conspiracy that defrauded the United States Department of Health and Human Services Medicare program. U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary also ordered her to pay restitution of $4,470,931.02, serve two years of supervised release, and pay a $600 special assessment charge.
On February 29, 2024, a jury convicted Singh of six counts of health care fraud for signing bogus orders for orthotic braces that patients never sought and did not require as part of a DME program.
Starting in 2019, Singh served as an independent contractor for at least two companies, claiming to offer “telehealth services,” and received payment for conducting patient consultations. The consultations never took place. Telemarketers would cold-call Medicare beneficiaries and offer them free orthotic braces. The beneficiaries were not Singh’s past patients, and she had never spoken with them. Singh never saw them in person and did not make a telemedicine appointment. The telemarketers would create orders containing the beneficiaries’ names, Medicare numbers, and stated diagnoses to support a bogus claim that the braces were medically necessary. The telemarketers electronically submitted the orders to Singh, who signed and certified that she was treating the Medicare recipient and that the brace was medically necessary. Singh approved over 11,000 prescriptions for orthotic braces for almost 3,000 Medicare beneficiaries with whom she had no patient-physician contact, and she routinely ordered multiple braces for each patient without ever seeing them.
Singh’s bogus instructions resulted in more than $8 million in Medicare billings for orthotic devices that were not medically necessary. In total, Medicare paid out $4.47 million in claims for Singh’s phony prescriptions.
Assistant United States Attorneys Gene Crawford and Angelita Cruz Bridges prosecuted this case on behalf of the Northern District of Ohio. The FBI and the Office of Inspector General of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) investigated the matter.
To report suspected health care fraud, waste, abuse, or mismanagement in HHS programs, go to https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/report-fraud/contact/ or call 1-800-447-8477.
