MARYLAND (WBFF) — A Maryland business owner faces years in federal prison after a jury found him guilty of running a multimillion-dollar Medicare scheme and stealing from vulnerable nursing home residents during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Federal prosecutors said Patrick Britton-Harr, a 42-year-old Annapolis man who owned a laboratory, fraudulently billed Medicare for more than $18 million in unnecessary respiratory tests that doctors did not order or perform. The jury’s verdict followed a detailed investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General and the FBI.
In 2020, Britton-Harr targeted nursing homes nationwide during a time when those facilities urgently needed COVID-19 testing. After gathering specimens from residents, he billed Medicare for expensive respiratory pathogen panel (RPP) tests, claiming they were performed at his lab in Arizona. However, court documents showed doctors never requested these tests and sometimes patients had already died by the time the charges were made…