Logan Laboratories Inc., a reference laboratory in Tampa, Florida; Tampa Pain Relief Centers Inc., a pain clinic also based in Tampa Florida, and; two of their former executives, Michael T. Doyle and Christopher Utz Toepke have agreed to pay a total of $41 million to resolve alleged violations of the False Claims Act for billing Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE, and other federal healthcare programs for medically unnecessary Urine Drug Testing (UDT). Both Logan Labs and Tampa Pain are subsidiaries of Surgery Partners Inc.; Doyle is the former CEO of Surgery Partners and Logan Labs, and; Toepke is the former Group President for Ancillary Services at Surgery Partners, with oversight of Logan Labs, and a former Vice President at Tampa Pain. The government alleged that Defendants knowingly submitted or caused the submission of false claims to federal healthcare programs for presumptive and definitive UDT, in circumstances where such testing was not medically reasonable or necessary. The government alleged that Defendants developed and implemented a policy and practice of automatically ordering both presumptive and definitive UDT for all patients at every visit, without any physician making an individualized determination that either test was medically necessary for the particular patients for whom the tests were ordered. According to the government’s allegations, the medically unreasonable and unnecessary definitive UDT was performed at Logan Labs, the medically unreasonable and unnecessary presumptive UDT was performed at Tampa Pain, and the respective resulting false claims were submitted by both Tampa Pain and Logan Labs to federal healthcare programs, from Jan. 1, 2010 through Dec. 31, 2017.
