A federal grand jury in Memphis, Tennessee, returned an indictment charging a podiatrist with a scheme to defraud Medicare and TennCare by prescribing and dispensing medically unnecessary foot bath medications. According to the indictment, Nathan Lucas, D.P.M., 56, of Memphis, owned and operated a podiatry clinic, Advanced Foot & Ankle Care of Memphis LLC, as well as multiple in-house pharmacies. The indictment alleges that Lucas regularly prescribed antibiotic and antifungal drugs to be mixed into a tub of warm water for patients to soak their feet. These drug cocktails included capsules, creams, and powders that were not indicated to be dissolved in water and some of which were not water soluble.
The indictment alleges that Lucas chose these medications to prescribe and dispense based on their anticipated reimbursement amount, rather than medical necessity. For example, in 2019, Lucas wrote a prescription to a patient for 1,080 capsules of vancomycin, 7,650 grams of econazole cream, and 180 grams of lidocaine, all to be dissolved in a foot bath, and caused Medicare to reimburse his pharmacy over $18,000 for dispensing these drugs. From in or around October 2018 to the present, Lucas allegedly caused his pharmacies to submit nearly $4 million in claims to Medicare and TennCare for dispensing expensive foot bath medications that were not medically necessary and would not have been eligible for reimbursement.
