A doctor from Mt. Airy, North Carolina was sentenced to 30 months of imprisonment and ordered to pay restitution totaling $2,049,747.47 after pleading guilty to one count of healthcare fraud and one count of money laundering. Wendell Lewis Randall, age 72, was sentenced to a 30-month term of imprisonment plus 2 years supervised release. This sentence was ordered to run consecutively to the 18-month sentence Randall is currently serving for a conviction in the Western District of Virginia. According to court records, Randall was the sole physician and owner of the National Institute of Toxicology, PLLC (NIT), located in Mt. Airy, NC. At NIT, Randall typically prescribed opioids or other controlled substances to his patients without regard to whether such prescriptions were medically indicated.
Randall then required his patients to submit to definitive urine drug tests (UDT) on every office visit without regard to the medical necessity of such tests. NIT had an in-house laboratory to run the UDT. From August 2018 through December 2021, Randall, through NIT, billed Medicare and North Carolina Medicaid for the UDT that reimbursed at the highest pay for nearly all of his patients on Medicare and Medicaid. Randall obtained $753,446.70 from Medicare and $1,296,300.77 from Medicaid for these fraudulently billed UDT. Randall used the fraudulently obtained proceeds to make several large purchases, including a building on property near his home in 2019 for a total of $97,000.
