The U.S. Justice Department intervened in the suit, originally filed in U.S. District Court in New Jersey by whistleblower Tony Kite in 2005, in Nov. 2009.
The government’s lawsuit alleged the hospital defrauded Medicare by inflating its charges to Medicare patients to obtain the supplemental reimbursements, also called outlier payments. These payments are intended for cases in which the cost of care is unusually high, but the cases for which Brookhaven received outlier payments were not extraordinarily costly and should not have merited them, the government alleged.
Under the civil settlement, the whistleblower will receive $613,00 plus interest, out of the proceeds.
Read the Justice Department press release on Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center.
