In the words of Peanuts great Lucy Van Pelt, “I’ll take any patient who has a problem and a nickel!” It was clear she was ready for business as she hung up “The Doctor is IN” sign. An exemplar for all medical professionals and a roll model that Dr. Gustavo Kinrys did not embrace. Kinrys would take the nickel. Almost $11 million worth. And his sign said, “The Doctor is OUT!”
Kinrys, a licensed psychiatrist, supposedly offered to patients suffering from depression psychotherapy and a type of therapy called transcranial magnetic stimulation. TMS therapy is a noninvasive method of brain stimulation that uses rapidly alternating or pulsed magnetic fields to induce electrical currents directed at a patient’s cerebral cortex. However, starting in January 2015, Kinrys did everything but see his patients. Kinrys engaged in a fraudulent billing scheme to Medicare and private insurers for services he did not render.
Kinrys billed Medicare and private insurers $10.6 million for thousands of TMS sessions he never provided, including over 8,000 sessions he claimed were provided to 74 patients who, in fact, never received a single session of the therapy. Among the patients for whom Kinrys billed insurers was his wife – whom he claimed he had given almost 500 TMS sessions when, in fact, she never underwent the procedure with him. Kinrys also billed hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of psychotherapy sessions he never provided, including over 900 face-to-face sessions he falsely claimed he provided while he was on vacation in locations like the Bahamas, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, and the Czech Republic.
Outstanding investigation by the Health and Human Services. Kinrys was found guilty of medical fraud, on October 23, 2023. The Doctor is IN…jail.
Today’s Fraud of The Day is based on article “Jury Convicts Natick Psychiatrist of Billing Medicare, Insurers For Nearly $11 Million Worth of Brain Treatments He Never Provided” published by Universal Hub on October 24, 2023
A federal jury in Boston today convicted dr. Gustavo Kinrys on 14 of 15 charges he faced for submitting bogus bills for depression treatments patients never got – and for hours he allegedly spent with patients but didn’t.
After his arrest in 2020, prosecutors said that on one day in 2017, kinrys submitted bills for one-hour sessions with 79 different patients over a 24-hour period. The government said he also billed medicare and private insurers for more than 1,000 sessions with 200 patients at times when he was actually out of the country. His indictment covered the period of 2015 to 2018.
