“It is illegal for companies to extend invitations to all-expense-paid sporting, entertainment, and recreational events, and other perk-filled offers to its prospective customers to win business and boost their bottom line through illegal kickback schemes,” said Joseph R.
“We will continue to hold accountable those who provide illegal incentives in order to influence the decision-making of health care providers.” Coyne, Special Agent in Charge for the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Time and again, we’ve seen fraudulent activity undermine the integrity of medical decisions, subvert the health marketplace, and waste taxpayer dollars,” said Phillip M. “If the benefits of Electronic Health Records are to be fully realized, patients must be confident providers have selected the most effective system – not the one paying the largest kickbacks. “EHR technology plays an important role in the provision of medical care, and it is critical that the selection of an EHR platform be made without the influence of improper financial inducements.” “This resolution demonstrates the department’s continued commitment to holding EHR companies accountable for the payment of unlawful kickbacks in any form,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton for the Department of Justice’s Civil Division. “We will aggressively pursue organizations that fail to play by the rules EHR companies are no exception.” Kickbacks corrupt the market for health care services and risk jeopardizing patient safety,” said United States Attorney Andrew E.
#ISCRIBE ATHENA SOFTWARE#
“Across the country, physicians rely on electronic health records software to provide vital patient data. Pursuant to those agreements, known as “Conversion Deals,” the other companies agreed to refer their clients to Athena, and Athena paid competitors based on the value and volume of practices that were successfully converted into Athena customers.Īs a result of these kickbacks, it is alleged that Athena improperly generated sales for itself while causing healthcare providers to submit false claims to the federal government related to incentive payments for adoption and “meaningful use” of Athena’s EHR technology. Finally, it is alleged that Athena entered into deals with competing companies that had decided to discontinue their health information technology products. Under this program, Athena paid up to $3,000 per physician that signed up for Athena services, regardless of how much time (if any) the client spent speaking or meeting with the lead. Second, Athena allegedly paid illegal fees to its customers through its “Lead Generation” program designed to identify new prospective customers. The most lavish of these events, such as “bucket list” trips to the Masters Tournament and the Kentucky Derby, included complimentary travel along with luxury accommodations, meals and alcohol. First, Athena allegedly invited prospects and customers to all-expense-paid sporting, entertainment and recreational events. In a complaint filed in conjunction with today’s settlement, the United States alleged that Athena violated the FCA and the Anti-Kickback Statute through three marketing programs. (Athena), a Watertown-based developer of electronic health records (EHR) services, has agreed to pay $18.25 million to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act (FCA) by paying illegal kickbacks to generate sales of its EHR product, athenaClinicals. Because we believe that it is impossible to construct a system that can achieve perfect segmentation, perfect separation of touching and overlapping chromosomes, perfect localization of the centromeres, and perfect classification, the system offers the possibility for interaction at each of the above stages using the well-accepted Macintosh user interface.BOSTON – athenahealth, Inc. Furthermore, the system provides the ability to construct one or more chromosome data bases to represent the types of metaphase spreads and staining techniques that may be used in a given laboratory. Athena provides automated segmentation of metaphase images into individual chromosomes, automated measurements on each banded chromosome, and automated classification into the standard Paris-convention karyotype. It uses software that is written entirely in C and consists of approximately 200 Kbytes of executable code. The system is based upon the Macintosh II computer. In this article we describe Athena, a system that provides for semi-automated karyotyping of metaphase spreads.
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