Jami L. Mayhew of Glen Carbon, Illinois, pleaded guilty to a single-count felony information charging her with healthcare fraud. Facts elicited at the plea hearing established that, from May 30 to June 26, 2017, the 41-year old nurse practitioner knowingly participated in a scheme to defraud Medicare by performing medically unnecessary visits in nursing homes located in St. Clair and Madison counties. Mayhew carried out the fraudulent scheme by seeing nursing home residents multiple times, examining them for only a few minutes at a time, generating progress notes she knew contained misrepresentations and materially false statements about the services she had performed, and falsely reporting that her visits met the billing requirements for complex subsequent nursing home encounters, when in fact they had not. As part of her guilty plea, Mayhew admitted that she knowingly caused 251 false claims to be submitted to Medicare during the charged timeframe. Medicare paid her employer, General Medicine, P.C., over $23,000 for those visits. Mayhew, herself, received $27 from the company for each of the false claims she caused to be submitted, for a total of $6,777.
