Eli's Hospice Insider

A newspaper exposé about a long-stay hospice patient getting hooked on narcotics has led to a Pittsburgh hospice medical director’s guilty plea for Medicare fraud.

In 2012, federal agents served Horizons Hospice medical director Oliver W. Herndon with a suspension order barring him from writing prescriptions for controlled substances and raided his office (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXI, No. 7). That occurred after a Bloomberg News article profiled the case of a Horizons Hospice patient who spent 32 months on service before being discharged with an alleged narcotics addiction.

Now Herndon has pled guilty to defrauding Medicare and Medicaid by falsely certifying that patients were appropriate for hospice care, the Department of Justice says in a release. He faces sentencing in July.