On February 6, 2018, the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida granted a motion to dismiss a non-intervened False Claims Act (FCA) suit concerning electronic billing practices for anesthesiology services. As with another recent dismissal, the court found that Relator had failed to present sufficient allegations to meet the particularity requirement of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 9(b).

The operative complaint alleged that Relator was a compliance review specialist and supervisor of physician coding at a health care provider, and that she utilized the defendant, Epic System’s Corp.’s, medical e-billing software. Relator alleged that she was trained for a week on the software, and then allegedly identified a software issue that resulted in double-billing for the time of anesthesiologists. Specifically, Relator referenced a January 1, 2012, change in Medicare practices which adjusted “units to be billed” for anesthesia services to be measured in actual minutes rather than 15-minute increments. Relator asserted that the e-billing software allowed hospitals to “double-charge” 15-minute increments plus the precise number of minutes of service. Relator alleged that she raised this issue with the defendant repeatedly and that Defendant implemented a very narrow adjustment which would only fix the issue at Relator’s employer’s office, allegedly leaving the “double-charge” error in effect at other users’ offices. (more…)