Health & Fitness
Mass. Hospital Fined For Excess Tick Tests: U.S. Attorney
The hospital will pay a fine for unnecessarily billing Medicare and Medicaid for tick-born disease tests, according to federal prosecutors.
NORTHAMPTON, MA — There are plenty of serious tick-borne disease to worry about in Massachusetts. But there are also some that you don't have to worry about.
A Northampton hospital — part of a larger statewide chain that includes Mass General and Brigham and Women's — will pay the federal government over $11,000 for charging Medicare and Medicaid for testing for diseases from ticks that don't live in Massachusetts, according to federal prosecutors.
Cooley Dickinson Hospital, an affiliate of Partner HealthCare, created a testing "panel" that doctors could use rather than selecting individual tests for diseases like Lyme and babesiosis, law enforcement officials said.
"When a [practitioners] selected a testing panel ... an order went to Cooley Dickinson’s laboratory to test for all the tick-borne diseases programmed into the testing panel, even though the panel included tests for diseases caused by ticks that were not likely to be present in the geographic region where the individual was bitten," federal prosecutors said in a statement this week.
The hospital will pay back $11,332 to the federal government for the unnecessary tests, which were offered between 2014 and 2017, according to prosecutors.
Three main types of tick live in Massachusetts: the dog tick, lone star tick, and black-legged or deer ticks, which are responsible for the most common tick-borne illnesses like Lyme, babesiosis, and anaplasmosis. The dog tick carries Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the most serious tick-borne illness — victims sometimes need to have limbs amputated and suffer long-term mental effects.
