April 1, 2016

Sharon Iglehart, a former attending psychiatrist at Riverside General Hospital in Houston, was sentenced to 144 months in prison and to pay roughly $6.4 million (and forfeit the same amount) for her role in a $158 million Medicare fraud scheme involving false claims for mental health treatment.  According to evidence presented at trial, Iglehart and others engaged in a scheme to defraud Medicare by submitting through Riverside fraudulent claims to Medicare for partial hospitalization program services, an intensive outpatient treatment for severe mental illness, when the patients for whom Riverside billed did not receive the services.  In fact, evidence proved that most of the Medicare beneficiaries rarely saw a psychiatrist and did not receive intensive psychiatric treatment at all.  To date, 12 other individuals have been convicted based on their roles in this scheme, including former Riverside president Earnest Gibson III.  DOJ