Health care company to pay $41M in fraud settlement

TAMPA — Surgery Partners and its businesses, Logan Laboratories Inc. and Tampa Pain Relief Centers Inc., have agreed to pay $41 million to settle a federal lawsuit that claimed they fraudulently billed Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE and other federal health care programs for medically unnecessary urine drug testing. 

According to a Department of Justice press release, whistleblowers brought the alleged fraud, which occurred from Jan. 1, 2010, through Dec. 31, 2017 — to the attention of the government. The whistleblowers will receive approximately $7.79 million from the settlement, the release states. 

Logan Labs and Tampa Pain are subsidiaries of Surgery Partners Inc.; Michael Doyle is the former CEO of Surgery Partners and Logan Labs, while Christopher Toepke is the former group president for ancillary services at Surgery Partners, with oversight of Logan Labs, as well as a former vice president of Tampa Pain.

The government alleged Doyle and Toepke developed and implemented a policy and practice of automatically ordering urine drug testing for all patients at every visit, without any physician making an individualized determination that tests were medically necessary for the particular patients for whom the tests were ordered. 

“Medical providers seeking profits at the expense of individualized patient care will be held accountable in our district,” U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida Maria Chapa Lopez states in the release. “We will protect our district’s residents from providers whose concern for their bottom line overrides medical decision making.”

Doyle, in a statement he submitted to the Business Observer through his attorney April 6, 2021, disputed some of the particulars in the press release from the U.S. Attorney's office. In a second note sent to the Business Observer May 11, that attorney, Breana Frankel, of The Law Offices of Breana Frankel in Laguna Niguel, California, says that the attorney who represented Doyle, Alan Rosenthal of Carlton Fields, also disputed some of the facts asserted by the Dept. of Justice and the whistleblower's counsel.

"This article reports on a settlement agreement that Mr. Doyle’s former employer, Surgery Partners, negotiated with the United States Attorney’s Office three years after Mr. Doyle had departed as the company’s CEO," says the statement. "Although he was named in the complaint, Mr. Doyle was unaware of the investigation — having not been informed about it by the United States Attorney’s Office, Surgery Partners or anyone else — until after the government and the company had agreed to settle the claim."

"The $41 million settlement was paid entirely by the company with no financial contribution from Mr. Doyle or Mr. Toepke," the statement from Doyle's attorney adds. "The complaint naming Mr. Doyle and Mr. Toepke as a defendant was dismissed, with prejudice, after the settlement. Importantly, the settlement did not include admission of liability and at no time has the U.S. Health and Human Services Inspector General (or any other governmental agency) pursued any administrative action against Mr. Doyle."

(This story, initially published online April 16, 2020, was updated April 6, 2021 with the information from The Law Offices of Breana Frankel. It was updated again May 12, 2021, with information from Doyle's attorney, Alan Rosenthal, on Doyle not admitting liability. That information was submitted by Frankel. The URL of the link to the story, in addition to the headline, was also updated to reflect that change.) 

The $41 million settlement was paid entirely by the company with no financial contribution from Mr. Doyle.  The complaint naming Mr. Doyle as a defendant was dismissed, with prejudice, after the settlement.