Indiana Doctor Sentenced on Health Care Fraud

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Prosecutors wanted a stiffer sentence U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Hogsett indicated. “While we argued this morning in favor of a sentence that we believe was befitting of the crimes committed, we respect the Judge Barker’s decision and will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to make whole the victims of Mr. Tiwari’s actions,” Hogsett is quoted saying in the release.

Tiwari specialized in anesthesiology and ran two clinics in the Bloomington area, Pain Management and Surgery Center of Southern Indiana, Inc. Both businesses shared the same office suite.

He had a federal Drug Enforcement Administration license to prescribe controlled substances and in the late 1990s, he began to focus his medical practice in “interventional pain management,” a specialty of medicine which includes a wide variety of therapies, often involving combinations of injection procedures and opioids, the release said.

From January 2007 through December 2007, Dr. Tiwari admitted he engaged in a scheme to defraud Medicaid, Medicare, and Anthem to increase revenues, by performing numerous medical procedures on patients that were not medically necessary, including such injection procedures as facet blocks, epidurals, and radiofrequency ablations.

The doctor also admitted to providing certain patients opioid prescriptions that exceeded any legitimate purpose. These prescriptions included such drugs as Percocet, Oxycontin, oxycodone, and methadone. These drugs, along with the excess steroids from the unnecessary procedures, caused some patients serious bodily injury, the release says.