The court said that the complaint lacked credible allegations denoting that false claims were actually submitted to Medicare. A federal Judge carrying out his duties in the Middle District of Florida has dismissed the lawsuit against EHR giant Epic systems that claimed that the company submitted false claims to Medicare.
The federal government has not intervened in the law suit and the dismissal actually came with prejudice to the whistleblower so it managed to effectively end the matter there and then. The mentioned suit said that Epic Systems’ EHR was responsible for causing hospitals to double-bill Medicaid and Medicare for anesthesia services.
The malfunctioning in the EHR system was found by Geraldine Petrowski who was working as a compliance officer at a hospital located in North Carolina. She alleged that the EHR software was actually designed to double-bill anesthesiology services.
Petrowski said that the Epic system was billing for both the actual time spent and equal base units. She said that the system converted the base units into minutes and added the two metrics together when it generated the final bill. The woman making the complaint only managed to provide one example of double-billing and that too was at a hospital in Texas. In that case, a five-hour surgery related to the removal of a prostate was billed for seven hours of anesthesiologist time.
The Judge named James S. Moody Jr., opined that the complaint failed to “state with particularity the circumstance constituting the fraud” and further lacked “some indicia of reliability. Also, the ruling specifically notes that Petrowski’s complaint actually failed to bring up adequate quality of credible allegations showing that false claims were submitted to Medicare. It further said that the complaint also lacked any supporting details that were required to plead a violation of the False Claims Act.
