Home Health & Hospice Week

A jury has convicted At Home VNA owner Michael Galatis on multiple counts of fraud and money laundering, the Department of Justice says in a release. Galatis, an RN, caused Waltham, Mass.-based AHVNA to submit more than $27 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare from 2006 to 2012, according to prosecutors. He trained AHVNA nurses to recruit older patients on Medicare who lived in large apartment buildings. Galatis held “wellness clinics” at large senior apartment buildings, where nurses convinced senior citizens to enroll with AHVNA and have a nurse visit them in their home, according to the DOJ. Galatis trained AHVNA nurses to manipulate the patients’ Medicare assessment forms to make it appear as though the patients qualified for Medicare home health services. The home health orders were signed by AHVNA’s paid medical director, Spencer Wilking, who has separately pleaded guilty to fraud (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXIII, No. 9). Wilking signed bogus face-to-face forms without seeing patients as well, the DOJ says.

Galatis ignored the patients’ physicians when they told him to stop sending home care workers to their patients’ homes, according to the DOJ.

The jury found that Galatis used portions of the proceeds of the fraud scheme to purchase a $750,000 house in Natick in 2010. Galatis’s home and $50,000 contained in two bank accounts related to the fraud scheme are forfeitable, the DOJ says.

Galatis is scheduled for sentencing Feb. 26 and Wilking faces sentencing Feb. 3. An alleged co-conspirator, AHVNA clinical director Janice Troisi, is scheduled to go to trial in June.