Medical Equipment Company VP and CFO Sentenced for Insurance Fraud

By Justin Ove

The vice president and chief financial officer of a medical equipment company with offices in the Dunwoody area who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud for a scheme in which he exaggerated claims on compression stockings to get higher health insurance payments has been sentenced to federal prison.

Daniel K. Lane, Jr. of Compass Healthcare will serve 18 months behind bars, followed by three years of probation. Lane must also complete 100 hours of community service and pay $597,304.76 in restitution, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced Wednesday.

Lane was responsible for billing insurance companies such as Medicare and Blue Cross for compression stocking equipment required by patients with edema, chronic venous insufficiency, and other related conditions. Compass is based in St. Louis, but has a branch office in Atlanta.

Instead of properly billing patients’ insurance companies, Lane and office manager Holly Keisker set up a fraudulent billing system that automatically charged insurers for the most expensive compression stocking possible. This “upcoding” generated higher payouts from the insurers.

Compass provided fake diagnoses on insurance claim forms to fool insurers into thinking the most expensive compression stockings were legitimate and used vague “blanket” diagnosis codes to support insurance payments for patients who did not actually need compression stockings. Lane and Keisker also submitted altered or completely fabricated prescriptions from doctors for the expensive stockings.

Keisker, who also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud, will be sentenced on Dec. 10.