The owner and chief executive officer of Spring Hill, Tennessee-based Crestar Labs, LLC, was charged with aiding and abetting and violation of the anti-kickback statute for his role in orchestrating a fraudulent Medicare billing scheme relating to genetic testing in cancer patients. The complaint alleges that beginning as early as 2016, Fadel Alshalabi, 53, of Waxhaw, North Carolina, as the owner of Crestar, engaged in a scheme to pay illegal healthcare kickbacks in exchange for the solicitation of genetic tests from Medicare beneficiaries. In addition to the laboratory in Spring Hill, Alshalabi owned associated labs in other locations, including Karemore Labs in Baltimore, Maryland, and Martis Labs and CrestarDX in Dallas, Texas.
Alshalabi, as the owner and Chief Executive Officer, contracted with marketing companies to target and recruit elderly patients who were federal healthcare program beneficiaries in order to obtain their genetic material for conducting genetic tests. Marketers, who were not healthcare professionals, obtained swabs from the mouths of the patients at nursing homes, senior health fairs, and elsewhere. The tests were then approved by telemedicine doctors who did not engage in the treatment of the patients, and often did not even speak with the patients for whom they ordered tests. Often, the patients or their treating physicians never received the results of the tests. Alshalabi paid illegal kickbacks and bribes in exchange for the doctor’s orders and tests, without regard to any medical necessity. During the period of late 2017 to present, Crestar billed Medicare approximately $86 million for genetic testing and was paid almost $14 million for those claims.
