The four Texas doctors convicted earlier this year in the Forest Park medical fraud trial are Texas doctors no more – at least for the time being.
The Texas Medical Board has suspended the licenses of three spinal surgeons, Drs. Douglas Won, Michael Rimlawi, and Shawn Henry; and a pain management physician, Dr. Mike Shah.
The suspensions, issued in late June, were unsurprising. Texas law requires the Medical Board to suspend the license of any doctor “initially convicted” of a felony.
Suspension is a temporary punishment, one the board can vote to lift if, say, a doctor convicted of a felony is subsequently exonerated.
However, Won, Rimlawi, Henry, and Shah would face mandatory revocation of their medical licenses should their convictions become final. The doctors have filed post-trial motions seeking retrials or court-ordered acquittals or both. Those motions are pending in U.S. District Court in Dallas.
In April, at the conclusion of a seven-week trial, a jury found the four physicians and three co-defendants guilty of taking part in what investigators called a singularly audacious insurance-billing scam at Forest Park Medical Center, a physician-owned surgical hospital that opened in North Dallas in 2009.
Forest Park, according to the government, paid $40 million in bribes and kickbacks to surgeons, chiropractors, and other healthcare professionals who sent well-insured patients — in particular, candidates for costly surgeries — to the hospital. Forest Park then billed patients’ insurance plans far more, sometimes astonishingly so, than what other North Texas hospitals were charging.
In less than four years, government records showed, said, the scheme brought in $200 million.
Won, Rimlawi, Henry and Shah were all convicted of conspiracy. Additionally, the jury found Rimlawi and Shah guilty of receiving “illegal remuneration” – bribes or kickbacks. Henry was convicted of money laundering and of violating the federal Travel Act by committing the underlying state offense of commercial bribery.
Another licensed medical professional, Iris Forrest, a vocational nurse, was convicted of conspiracy and taking kickbacks. As of Friday, the Texas Board of Nursing said her nursing license remained current, with no disciplinary actions pending against her.
Sentencing hearings have not been scheduled for any of those convicted.
The Forest Park scandal has cost at least three other doctors their medical licenses.
Last month, Wade Barker, one of Forest Park’s co-founders, voluntarily surrendered his license. Barker, who had been a weight-loss surgeon, was originally indicted in the Forest Park case. He cut a plea deal with the government and testified against his former colleagues.
Richard Toussaint, a onetime anesthesiologist and Barker’s business partner, also avoided trial through a plea bargain. He agreeing to cooperate with the government, but, unlike Barker, he wasn’t called to testify. His license status is listed on the Medical Board’s website as “retired.”
David Kim, once a prominent weight-loss surgeon from Colleyville, surrendered his medical license last October. He, too, pleaded guilty in the Forest Park case. Testifying as a government witness, he admitted that he’d taken $4.5 million in kickbacks from the hospital, adding that he was far from the only surgeon on the take. Separately, Kim pleaded guilty a year ago to tax fraud, saying he’d hidden $18.3 million in income from the Internal Revenue Service from 2012 to 2015.