The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado announced that Dynamic Physical Therapy, LLC (“Dynamic”), a physical therapy company, and its owner, Emad Yassa, have agreed to pay the United States $400,000 to resolve allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by falsely billing federal healthcare programs for aquatic therapy services. Dynamic is a physical therapy company that operates two clinics in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Dynamic is owned by Mr. Yassa, who also practices as a physical therapist at the Dynamic clinics. Dynamic submitted bills for physical and aquatic therapy services to Medicare and other federal healthcare programs. In 2019, a former employee of Dynamic filed a sealed civil “whistleblower” lawsuit under the False Claims Act alleging that Dynamic, at the direction of Mr. Yassa, was billing Medicare for medically unnecessary physical therapy services and for services that had not actually been provided.
After the whistleblower complaint was filed, Mr. Yassa signed a “Stipulation and Final Board Order” with the State of Colorado’s Physical Therapy Board. In the stipulation, Mr. Yassa admitted that, from mid-2014 to mid-2017, he “routinely and improperly billed insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid for individual aquatic therapy sessions for his patients when they had actually participated in group aquatic therapy sessions,” and also “routinely failed to document in his patients’ records that they had participated in group aquatic therapy sessions.”
