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The U.S. Attorney’s Office has filed a complaint under the False Claims Act against Steward Health Care System and its subsidiaries, alleging violations of the physician self-referral law and submission of false claims to Medicare.
The government announced the filing of its complaint against the Dallas-based Steward system, Steward Medical Group and Steward St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston Dec. 18.
The complaint claims that between January 2013 and March 2022, Steward Medical Group overpaid Arvind Agnihotri, MD, chief of cardiac surgery at Steward St. Elizabeth’s, in relation to fair market value and linked the compensation to the volume or value of his referrals to the hospital.
The government alleges that the medical group paid Dr. Agnihotri nearly $5 million in incentive pay tied to the number of cases Dr. Agnihotri referred to the 308-bed hospital, Dr. Agnihotri made referrals to the hospital in violation of the Stark Law, and the hospital then submitted over 1,000 claims to Medicare, which mistakenly paid tens of millions of dollars for the false claims.