Dr. Ibrahim Oudeh, his wife Teresa Sloan-Oudeh, and Dr. Oudeh’s medical practice agreed to relinquish approximately $3,300,000 worth of assets and further agreed to a conditional consent judgment in the amount of $5,500,000 to settle civil False Claims Act liability for allegedly false Medicare and Medicaid claims. The United States and the State of North Carolina alleged that Dr. Oudeh, Ms. Sloan-Oudeh, and the practice were liable for more than 40,000 fraudulent claims that were systematically submitted to Medicare and Medicaid between 2010 and 2017. Specifically, the Governments argued that Defendants falsely obtained approximately $1,900,000 from Medicare for over 37,000 diagnostic tests, an astronomical number of tests for a solo practitioner in a small North Carolina town. Defendants profited handsomely from them. They allegedly short-changed the outside physicians who interpreted those tests by paying them less than the practice’s Medicare reimbursement, and then pocketed the difference, all in violation of the federal Anti-Markup Rule. To boot, the Governments asserted that the vast majority of the more-than-37,000 tests were medically unnecessary. The Governments also alleged that Defendants falsely billed for office visits. In some of those instances, Defendants billed more than twenty-four hours’ worth of supposed visits with one physician in a single day. In others, the evidence showed that the visits were for medication refills rather than for the complex, labor-intensive examinations that Defendants claimed. Finally, the Governments contended that Defendants falsely obtained approximately $640,000 from Medicare and Medicaid after Dr. Oudeh certified almost 4,300 nerve-conduction studies that, by his own admission, he was unqualified to interpret. Dr. Oudeh also admitted to the Governments that he used the nerve-conduction studies as mere screening tools, in direct contravention of Medicare and Medicaid billing requirements.
