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Philippe Chain agreed to the civil settlement to resolve the allegations that he violated the False Claims Act, U.S. Attorney John Durham said.
Chain, who currently has a practice in Florida, previously practiced medicine in Connecticut. He also worked for CallMD, a telemedicine company in Nevada that involved him prescribing compound medications to TRICARE beneficiaries.
Durham said that “TRICARE is the federal health care program for active-duty military personnel, retirees, and their families. ‘Compounding’ is a practice by which a pharmacist combines, mixes, or alters the ingredients of a drug to create a medication tailored to the needs of an individual patient. Compounded medications are not FDA-approved.”
It is alleged that Chain caused pharmacies to submit false claims for compounded medications to TRICARE by issuing or approving prescriptions that were invalid because Chain did not speak with or examine the patients and did not have an established physician-patient relationship with them.
It is also alleged that many of the prescriptions were not medically necessary.
To resolve the allegations of False Claims Act violations, Chain agreed to pay $300,000 for claims submitted to TRICARE between Jan, 28 and July 28 in 2015.
“We will work to aggressively protect the health care benefits for our service members, veterans, and their families,” Durham. said in a statement “Health care providers who cause false claims to be submitted to federal health care programs will be held accountable.”
“One of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service’s (DCIS) investigative priorities is to ensure the integrity of TRICARE, the U.S. Department of Defense’s health care program for military members, retirees and their dependents,” Leigh-Alistair Barzey, Special Agent in Charge of the DCIS Northeast Field Office added. “This settlement is the result of a joint effort and demonstrates DCIS’ ongoing commitment to partner with the Connecticut U.S. Attorney’s Office to investigate and prosecute health care providers who submit false claims to TRICARE.”
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