Baltimore, Maryland — The pitch was simple, and in the fall of 2020, nursing homes wanted to hear it. A lab owner was offering COVID-19 testing for residents at facilities across the country, a lifeline at a moment when testing capacity couldn’t keep up with the virus.
Federal prosecutors say the COVID testing was real. The billing that followed was not.
On Tuesday, a federal jury in the District of Maryland convicted Patrick Britton-Harr, 42, of Annapolis, on five counts of health care fraud and one count of transactional money laundering. According to the Department of Justice, he used his company, Provista Health, to bill Medicare $18.7 million for respiratory pathogen panel tests purportedly performed over just six months. Medicare paid out more than $7.2 million of that.
How the scheme worked
After other laboratories ran the COVID-19 tests nursing homes actually needed, prosecutors said Britton-Harr billed Medicare for separate, high-priced respiratory pathogen panels — tests that screen for more than 30 pathogens at once. The problem: treating physicians never ordered them. Several doctors testified at trial that they had never ordered a single RPP test for any patient in their entire careers.
The scheme had help. Britton-Harr directed inexperienced employees, including a family member and high school and college-aged interns, to attach an RPP test to every COVID-19 test that crossed the lab. At one point, he billed Medicare for panels supposedly run at his Arizona laboratory after it had already closed, the equipment was gone, and staff had been barred from the building. Federal officials said some of the billed tests covered nursing home residents who were already dead.
Where the money went
Prosecutors say the proceeds funded a lavish lifestyle: a $112,500 Porsche 911, plus $25,000 monthly mortgage payments on an Annapolis waterfront mansion. Britton-Harr had also previously been convicted in an unrelated investment fraud scheme.
He now faces up to 10 years in prison on each count. A sentencing date hasn’t been set.
A wider enforcement picture
The verdict lands as scrutiny of nursing home billing intensifies — even as federal fines against nursing homes have actually fallen sharply, a trend a watchdog report flagged earlier this month. U.S. Attorney Kelly O. Hayes of the District of Maryland didn’t mince words after the verdict, calling the decision to exploit “elderly nursing-home residents and inexperienced interns” during a pandemic unconscionable.
“There is nowhere to hide for those who commit fraud,” Hayes said in a statement.
The case was investigated by HHS-OIG and the FBI. It’s also part of a much larger push: the Justice Department’s health care fraud strike forces have charged more than 6,200 defendants since 2007, in schemes that collectively billed more than $45 billion to federal health programs and private insurers.
For operators, the message from Baltimore is blunt. Pandemic-era billing records haven’t gone away — and neither has the appetite to reexamine them.
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