A Lexington doctor who wrote prescriptions that resulted in fraudulent billing of more than $14 million to Medicare has been sentenced to two years in federal prison.
The sentence for Amr Mohamed includes $14.1 million in restitutionaccording to a press release from the US Department of Justice.
Mohamed, 55 years old, specialized in kidney diseases. He had been licensed in Kentucky since 2012 and worked at UK HealthCare before being charged in March 2023.
The indictment stems from his work with RediDoc, a purported telemedicine company, and not the university.
RediDoc paid Mohamed to write orders for medical equipment, creams and genetic tests for Medicare beneficiaries.
Federal authorities claimed the products and tests were not medically necessary because Mohamed did not establish a genuine doctor-patient relationship with the patients and the tests were not used for therapeutic purposes.
Mohamed’s guilty plea cited a case in which a Kentucky woman received a call from a merchant telling her she was eligible for a free medical device.
The orthodontic appliances involved in the scheme were typically wrist, shoulder, knee and ankle braces, according to the court filing.
The woman told the caller she couldn’t use the braces and shouldn’t send them, but Mohamed wrote an order to get them anyway.
Mohamed received $261,054 from RediDoc between March 2018 and April 2019 for writing orders for more than 7,000 people, but the company billed Medicare $14,150,764 for the unnecessary products and tests, according to court documents.
Mohamed’s attorney, John W. Oakley II, said in a sentencing memorandum that Mohamed thought he was helping people and had no idea that RediDoc had billed the federal government so much money because of his work .
Oakley said he believed “that Dr. Mohamed was used and manipulated by Redidoc to satisfy his own selfish goals and objectives at his and his family’s expense.”
The range of sentences handed down to Mohamed, according to advisory guidelines, called for at least three years and 10 months in prison depending on the amount of fraudulent billing.
Oakley asked for a lower sentence, pointing out that Mohamed had repaid the $261,054 he received from RediDoc and lost his job and professional license.
U.S. District Judge Karen K. Caldwell sentenced Mohamed Tuesday in federal court in Lexington.
The case against Mohamed was part of a larger national conspiracy in which marketers identified Medicare beneficiaries and called them to persuade them to try drugs or equipment “even when the beneficiary’s need for those items was n “were unclear and were not discussed with the beneficiary’s doctor”, according to an accusation against a RediDoc manager.
The marketers then sent the information to RediDoc and the company paid doctors to write prescriptions and prescriptions, according to the court filing.
The company’s owners, Stephen Luke and David C. Laughlin Jr., both of Arizona, pleaded guilty but were not sentenced.
Both men admitted to participating in more than $64 million in fraudulent invoices…
