Home Health & Hospice Week

HHA owner Michael Galatis has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison following his Medicare fraud conviction last fall. The judge also ordered him to pay $7 million in restitution and to forfeit proceeds from the scheme, including his $850,000 house.

Galatis, an RN, caused Waltham, Mass.-based At Home VNA 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 Justice Department. 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.

Janice Troisi, also an RN and the AHVNA clinical director, is scheduled to go to trial in July. Dr. Wilking is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 22.