The last of several whistleblower claims against the Center for Diagnostic Imaging (CDI), a radiology firm with facilities in seven U.S. states, have been settled for $1.5 million, according to legal firm Hagens Berman.
The Seattle-based law firm handled the portion of claims that the U.S. government declined to prosecute, which involved charges that CDI allegedly billed for services without a written order from a treating physician, and that it used lease arrangements to allegedly disguise improper kickbacks to treating physicians, Hagens Berman said.
CDI denied the charges, and the government declined to prosecute for them in 2011 while agreeing to intervene in one other charge: that CDI allegedly defrauded federally funded health programs by improperly upcoding billings associated with epidural injections.
In 2011, the U.S. settled the upcoding charges for $1.3 million, 22% of which was awarded to Patricia West, CDI's former vice president of operations and business development for the state of Washington, and Dr. Alexander Serra, the founding partner of Sound Medical Imaging, a servicer of CDI outpatient centers in the Puget Sound region, who brought the original whistleblower charges via other legal representatives.
All charges were brought on behalf of the U.S. under the False Claims Act, which allows whistleblowers to sue on the government's behalf to attempt to recover taxpayer funds lost through fraud.
