Indian American Couple Agrees to Pay Over $420,000 to Settle Patient Referral Kickbacks Case
- Dr. Vijesh Patel and his office manager and wife Laju Patel allegedly received illegal kickbacks in return for referring patients for laboratory testing.
Indian American physician Dr. Vijesh Patel and his office manager and wife Laju Patel, both of Port Neches, Texas, have agreed to pay $422,789 to resolve False Claims Act allegations involving New Jersey, Texas and South Carolina Laboratories. The Department of Justice, in a press release, said that the couple “received illegal kickbacks in violation of the Anti-Kickback Statute in return for referring patients for laboratory testing.” Additionally, both have “agreed to cooperate with DOJ’s investigations of, and litigation against, other participants in the alleged schemes,” the press release added.
The Anti-Kickback Statute “prohibits offering, paying, soliciting, or receiving remuneration to induce referrals of items or services covered by Medicare, Medicaid and other federally funded healthcare programs,” the DOJ said. It is intended “to ensure that medical providers’ judgments are not compromised by improper financial incentives and are instead based on the best interests of their patients.”
In the Dec. 14 settlement, the DOJ listed the three laboratories where the couple sent referrals. Dr. Patel allegedly received thousands of dollars in payments from December 2016 to July 2018, “from Indus MG LLC, a purported management service organization, in return for ordering laboratory tests from True Health Diagnostics LLC (True Health), a clinical laboratory in Frisco, Texas,” the DOJ said. The payments made to Dr. Patel by Indus “allegedly were disguised as investment returns, but were in fact based on, and offered in exchange for, his referrals to True Health.”
In New Jersey, Dr. Patel allegedly received thousands of dollars in payments from August 2018 to August 2021, “in kickbacks disguised as investment returns from Avior Group LLC, in return for ordering laboratory tests from RDx Bioscience, Inc., a clinical laboratory in Kenilworth, New Jersey.” The DOJ said. “RDx allegedly funded remuneration to Dr. Patel in the form of volume-based commissions paid to an independent contractor recruiter, Corum Group LLC, which used an associated company, Avior, to pay kickbacks to Dr. Patel and other physicians in return for their referrals.” In addition, Laju Patel allegedly received kickbacks from RDx, from December 2018 to August 2022, “in the form of commercially unreasonable fees to purportedly collect urine specimens for testing that Dr. Patel referred to RDx.”
Similarly, from August 2019 to December 2021, Dr. Patel “allegedly received hundreds of dollars per month in inflated space rental payments in return for ordering laboratory tests from Labtech Diagnostics LLC, a clinical laboratory in Anderson, South Carolina,” the DOJ said. “Labtech’s rental payments allegedly were for a commercially unreasonable amount of space and excessive days and time.”