A suburban Chicago diagnostics company that provides home sleep testing will pay $3.5 million to the United States to settle a civil lawsuit accusing the company of defrauding Medicare and four other federal healthcare programs through kickbacks and unnecessary home sleep testing. The suit in US District Court in Chicago alleged that Snap Diagnostics LLC, a nationwide provider of home sleep testing diagnostic services based in Wheeling, Ill.; its founder, Gil Raviv; and its vice president, Stephen Burton, violated the False Claims Act and the Anti-Kickback Statute by fraudulently billing Medicare and four other federal healthcare programs for medically unnecessary services and for services that were occasioned by kickbacks. The suit alleged that Raviv directed SNAP to submit claims for patients’ second and third nights of home sleep testing when, in fact, the company knew that only a single night of testing was needed to effectively diagnose obstructive sleep apnea and that it routinely tested and claimed only one night for patients with private health insurance. As a result, the suit alleged that, in addition to defrauding five federal agencies, SNAP unlawfully multiplied the copays it received from senior citizens who were Medicare beneficiaries. The suit also alleged that SNAP’s business model relied on several unlawful kickback schemes, which incentivized physicians and their staffs to refer all of their home sleep testing services to SNAP.
