Doctor arrested by DEA pleads not guilty
http://wishtv.com/2015/01/26/doctor-arrested-by-dea-pleads-not-guilty/
In July of 2013, the Centers for Pain Relief opened an office in Muncie, Indiana. This office was one of 12 locations in Indiana, with the remaining 11 in northern Indiana.
Geography must not be this reporters strong suit… Muncie is abt 50 miles NE of Indianapolis… basically the center of the state and Fort Wayne is abt 60 miles North of Muncie… so if Muncie is nearly 200 miles from Indiana’s southern border.. total distance from southern to northern border is abt 250-275 miles.. so Muncie is NOT IN NORTHERN INDIANA ?
During the investigation, several former employees shared with investigators the fact they were concerned about the number of patients Hedrick had been seeing, his billing practices, the manner in which he would prescribe medication to his patients, and patient follow up care.
Could some of these FORMER (disgruntled ) EMPLOYEES be the ones that was doing the processing of the billing for the practice and they were so poorly trained, incompetent or intentionally miscoded some of the electronic/computer billing to Medicaid which this administrative billing errors are now viewed as fraudulent ?
Court documents also reveal the fact Gunderson-Watson saw these patients and prescribed the medications but someone else’s name was on the prescriptions, leading to three forgery and three registration charges for Gunderson-Watson.
Wasn’t the physician the supervising physician for the ARNP… so signatures on Rxs are material.. in Indiana.. a ARNP has the same limits on prescribing as the supervising physician.
In November, after the October raid at the Muncie clinic, all the locations of the Fort Wayne-based Indiana Pain Centers shut their doors, affecting an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 patients in northeast Indiana. Medical officials in Allen County and Fort Wayne called the influx of patients a community health crisis. Allen County Health Commissioner Dr. Deb McMahan warned that the community was maxed out and would be unable to absorb the large number of patients quickly.
So these law enforcement agencies.. INTENTIONALLY created a medical care crisis in these communities with seemingly little regard for the health and well being of all these pts… I suspect that there will be not documentation of suicides of the pts that were being seen by these clinics.. If someone contributes to the death of another person or contributes to their suicide… isn’t that ILLEGAL …
There I go again… law enforcement is only concerned about enforcing our laws… the collateral damage… of enforcing our laws… is none of their concern.
Filed under: General Problems
The exact scenario happened in Montana 4/12/14.
Florance.
DEA raids Doctors office.
Silence since.
Hmmm
Since the last newspaper reportings in December discussing the healthcare crisis of the 5000-10,000 patients left without physicain coverage for their pain management and the potential inability for local pain clinics to be able to absorb these patients as their medications were running out, I have not been able to find any other recent follow up stories. It’s like suddenly nobody cares anymore now. As far as his license, the last Medical Board listing was the October meeting where they have the emergency suspension of his license. My guess is they will wait until after the legal proceedings are finished.
Thanks so much for the update (and for checking up on this story).
For a couple of months it was big news and now dropped like a hot potatoe….exremely sad….I don’t know any one in Ft Wayne or Muncie area pharmacist wise to contact to see what’s going one.
We all know that the DEA is only about the money they can seize and the harm that they cause to both patients and doctors. Why did not the government help with this crisis? Who is taking care of those patients now? How many criminals have not been arrested and are still committing crime? Why was this crisis not newsworthy?
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The DEA spent a lot of time and effort investigating these pain clinics, and yet could only come up with a few alleged bad acts. No overdoses or deaths linked to this doctor?
Hopefully, there won’t be any long-term damages from all those injections, although the DEA doesn’t really care about that.
I used to wonder why the DEA didn’t set up additional access to health care for the patients affected by its actions — prior to arresting the doctor(s) and closing down a clinic or pharmacy. I guess the agency thinks this would hinder their investigation…
I also wonder about the employees that ratted to the DEA… It appears they did so of their own accord. But did the agency threaten them too? What did they think would happen to all their patients (and their jobs)? Sounds pretty selfish, if you ask me.
This is how they operate… they find a few errors, exceptions, aberrations and they then proceed to … This prescriber is not PERFECT and it took us 1-2 yrs of investigations to find out these examples of why he/she is not perfect… so these issues are violation of our laws… and is totally unacceptable and the law mandates that we must charge him/her.. and we are obligated to send out numerous press releases to warn the community abt this “bad doctor” and how GREAT we are for protecting them from such bad doctors. We understand that many/most/all of this doc’s pts will not be able to find anyone to treat them.. and they should not have allowed themselves to become addicted to these opiates.. We have uncovered a few pts that have admitted that they were addicts and had no real medical needs for opiates.. so probably all of the people being prescribed opiates by this doctor are addicts as well.. These people should just be happy that we didn’t arrest all of them for obtaining opiates by deception and did not have a legit medical need..
It must be hard to be a DEA agent… To surrender your ability to be sympathetic and empathetic — heck, your very humanity — for the sake of law and order.
I don’t suppose we’ll ever see the DEA become part of the solution. The agency doesn’t even seem to realize that the drug war is causing a giant rift between patients and doctors, pharmacists, and the medical industry. Once trust is lost…