The CEO of a onetime thriving North Texas hospice-care agency has pleaded guilty to his role in a $60 million Medicare and Medicaid fraud – and he’s not alone.
In a plea agreement, Bradley J. Harris, 39, who once ran Novus and Optimum Health Services, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and fraud. And he’s cooperating with prosecutors in the investigation of four other healthcare officials scheduled to stand trial April 5 in the Northern District of Texas: Mark Gibbs and Laila Hirjee, both physicians and Novus medical directors; Ali Rizvi, owner of a separate physicians’ home-visit company; and Tammie Little, a registered nurse with Novus.
Harris told the government that from 2012 to 2016, he billed Medicare and Medicaid for hospice services that either were not provided, were not directed by a medical professional, or were provided to patients who were ineligible for hospice care under the two federal health insurance programs.
In addition, Harris, an accountant by training, confessed to using blank, presigned prescription pads to dole out controlled drugs to patients. Further, he said Gibbs and Hirjee frequently certified that hospice patients’ illnesses were terminal without examining those patients. The doctors, he said, were paid about $150 for each order falsely certifying a patient’s condition as terminal.
Harris is scheduled for sentencing Aug. 3 before U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn, chief judge of the Northern District. He faces up to 14 years in a federal penitentiary.
Prerak Shah, acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District, said after the former CEO’s guilty plea was entered Friday: “Mr. Harris scammed federal healthcare programs out of millions of dollars and, worse yet, denied vulnerable patients the medical oversight they deserved, writing pain prescriptions without physician input and allowing terminally ill patients to go unexamined.
“The Justice Department cannot allow unscrupulous business people to interfere with the practice of medicine. We are determined to root out healthcare fraud.”
In an interview before her resignation in December, then-U.S. Attorney Erin Nealy Cox told The Texas Lawbook that one of the most important legacies of her three years in office would be the white-collar fraud investigations initiated on her watch that had not yet come to full fruition.
“What you’re going to see are cases across the spectrum,” she said. “Financial fraud, elderly fraud, oil and gas fraud, bankruptcy fraud, and a lot of COVID fraud – unfortunately, people exploiting the pandemic for their personal profit. These cases are going to be keeping prosecutors busy for a very long time. And, of course, healthcare fraud.”
During her tenure, Nealy Cox, an appointee of President Donald Trump, made the Northern District a jurisdiction of choice for federal investigators seeking to prosecute far-ranging, complex white-collar criminal conspiracies. The district comprises 100 counties from Far West Texas and the Panhandle to the greater Dallas area.
Before closing, Novus was considered one of the largest hospice companies in North Texas, with patients spread over 20 counties including Dallas, Tarrant, Collin and Denton.
Harris, according to federal court records, is represented principally by Christopher Knox of the Knox Law Firm in Dallas.
Novus is represented by, among others, Abbe David Lowell, a partner in the Washington and New York City offices of Winston & Strawn and one of the country’s foremost white-collar defense litigators, and Carlos Dantes Mejias of Mejias Lindsay in Houston.
The Novus prosecution is headed by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Donna Strittmatter Max, Marty Basu and Chad Meacham.
Others who have pleaded guilty in the case are:
- Amy Harris, Bradley Harris’s wife and Novus’s vice president of patient services,
- Melanie Murphy, director of operations,
- Samuel Anderson, vice president of marketing,
- Slade Brown, director of marketing,
- Charles Leach, Reziuddin Siddique and Syed Aziz, physicians and Novus medical directors,
- Jessica Love and Patricia Armstrong, registered nurses, and
- Taryn Stuart, a licensed vocational nurse.