Kyle D. McLean, 36, of Arlington Heights, Illinois, admitted his role in a scheme to defraud the Medicare Program in connection with fraudulent orders for genetic tests. McLean and certain of his conspirators operated Privy Health Inc., a company that acquired DNA samples and Medicare information from hundreds of patients through various methods, including offering $75 gift cards to patients, all without the involvement of a treating healthcare professional. Privy partnered with another company, Ark Laboratory Network LLC, which purported to operate a network of laboratories that facilitated genetic testing. Matthew S. Ellis, a physician based in Gainesville, Florida, and a co-defendant charged in the indictment, served as the ordering physician who authorized genetic testing for hundreds of patients across the country that he never saw, examined, or treated. These included patients from New Jersey and various other states where Ellis was not licensed to practice medicine. Through this process, Ellis, McLean, and others submitted and caused to be submitted fraudulent orders for genetic tests to numerous clinical laboratories. These orders falsely certified that Ellis was the patients’ treating physician and, in some cases, falsely indicated that a patient had a personal or family history of cancer. In 2018 alone, Medicare paid clinical laboratories at least approximately $4.6 million for genetic tests that Ellis ordered as part of this scheme.
