And that is thousands of dollars, not hundreds of dollars, ” said prosecutors.Įvery patient was tested every time for every drug, said Jason Mehta an assistant U.S. "They confirmed that the results they had in their point of care cup were accurate. But what Coastal did, according to prosecutors, is that regardless of what these results were, they took the urine and they put it into a very sophisticated machine that they bought and did what they called confirmatory testing. The government said the initial set of tests which would detect the presence of drugs and cost only hundreds of dollars, is a reasonable action for a pain management clinic. The government claimed the tests were unnecessary.īut according to the settlement, the government says the company knew or should have known the tests were “not medically reasonable or necessary."Īs an example, the practice included testing 80-year-olds for exotic and illegal drugs, first with a test to detect the presence of those and other more common drugs and then, even when no evidence was found, with a much costlier screen that would detect the exact quantities of those drugs in the person’s system. Those tests are expensive tests to identify and count particles of illicit drugs such as ecstasy, cocaine and heroin in elderly patients. The practice billed Medicare and TRICARE for "Quantitative Drug Tests" (QDT). Testing Elderly for Heroin, Cocaine and Ecstasy On August 31, 2016, one such outlier, Physicians Group Services, P.A., doing business as Coastal Spine and Pain based in Jacksonville, Florida, agreed to pay $7.4 million to the government to resolve allegations that Coastal violated the False Claims Act by performing medically unnecessary drug screening procedures.
Prosecutors then went after some outliers. Cahill and Coastal Spine Institute for improving my life so greatly.Government statisticians using “Big Data” began noticing that some providers were giving lots of tests to the elderly to detect illegal drugs and then billing Medicare. The only problem I have is pacing myself and not doing too much too early because I feel that good. If I have to go down this road again for other parts of my spine, he is my only option. He even shows that same approach to my wife’s neck problems as we are dealing with that now. He and his staff assisted me thru pain management, physical therapy, and other options, until surgery was the only solution. Very patient and understanding.Īlso, Dr Cahill is different than most surgeons I have met in that he views surgery as a last option. Dr Cahill understood why I was apprehensive and met with me as many times as it took to answer all of the questions that I had. One year after his back surgery he was 4” shorter and using a walker. Most of my fear came from the disaster of a back surgery that my father got in Wilmington, NC.
I like most was very apprehensive about getting back surgery.
I am amazed every day at how good I feel. The only pain I have is incision pain where they went in through my abs which gets better every day. On 1/29/21 he performed an “A lift” on my L5-S1 that basically fused me front and back. I have been struggling with lower back pain for well over a year.
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