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| | Police Raid Medical Offices Of Advanced Radiology In Beverly Hills. Clinic Was Going To Factor $10 Million In Receivables Of Predominantly Workers' Compensation Liens.
By Lonce LaMon - August 25, 2011
Late this morning, it appears the Los Angeles Police Department raided the medical facilities of Ronald Grusd, M.D., a radiologist with a practice at 8641 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 105, in Beverly Hills, California.
It appears a former name for Grusd's practice was Millenium Imaging, however, Click here to make an offer on this domain name, is now written at the top part of the web page at the address of www.milleniumimaging.com. Now the practice is known as Advanced Radiology and there is a web site at arobh.com, which stands for Advanced Radiology of Beverly Hills. They state they have offices in Pasadena, Downey, Santa Ana, Lancaster, and Colton.
Other former names of Radiology practices used by Dr. Grusd in the past are Beverly Radiology and Roxanne Radiology.
An agent who brings together sellers and buyers of receivables, and has a product called Lien Patient Solutions, indicated a meeting had been scheduled for this morning with Advanced Radiology together with Medstar Funding, a Medical Lien Financial Group, but he and possibly others who expected to be participating in the meeting, got a text message stating the meeting had been cancelled.
But someone who showed up at 8641 Wilshire Boulevard reported that there was a Police line there and that the clinic had been shut down.
Medstar Funding was looking into buying 10 million dollars worth of Advanced Radiology's receivables which were in the form of workers' compensation liens. In an article published by workcompcentral on August 15th, Medstar, a Texas based company, has expanded its business into California and has been buying accounts receivables from medical groups that are waiting to be paid on workers' compensation liens. Dan Christensen, CEO of Medstar, expressed according to that workcompcentral article that there is an "unprecedented" opportunity in California for buying workers' compensation liens because of the dysfunction of the California workers' compensation system. In most states, according to Christensen in that same August 15th article, his company buys receivables related to unpaid medical bills related to personal injury cases.
The agent who asked not to be identified by name, stated there had been a lot of time and money spent on buying Advanced Radiology's receivables, and that he sensed days earlier there was something he wasn't being told. He had to pull teeth to just get an accounts receivables report with a name and a date.
"They said, 'Once we get paid we take it out of the system all together,' " according to the agent, who went on to express that no company ever handles their receivables that way.
In July of 2010, Advanced Radiology of Beverly Hills paid the federal government $647,000 to settle alegations that they filed false claims with Medicare for unnecessary radiological tests.
The settlement was paid by Advanced Radiology's parent company, The Oaks Diagnostics, Inc. After the payment was made, the government asked the federal judge to dismiss a civil lawsuit that alleged Advanced Radiology performed unnecessary diagnostic tests and billed Medicare for the procedures.
The United States had alleged in that civil lawsuit that Advanced Radiology and its owner, Ronald Grusd, M.D., had engaged in a scheme to bill Medicare for unnecessary tests from 1999 to 2002. In the scheme, an Advanced Radiology contractor recruited Medicare beneficiaries to undergo diagnostic tests such as CT scans and MRIs, even though the beneficiaries did not need the tests.
The contractor--Nordelyn Lowder-- pleaded guilty to one count of health care fraud and was sentenced in June 2008 to 20 months in federal prison and was ordered to pay $426,455 in restitution.
The settlement resolved allegations initially made against Advanced Radiology in a "whistleblower" lawsuit. This whistleblower lawsuit was originally filed in 2003 by a former Advanced Radiology employee. The United States intervened and took over prosecution of the case in February 2008.
Advanced Radiology paid the settlement without admitting any wrongdoing.
Ronald Grusd, M.D. was not a party to the settlement, but in light of the settlement with Advanced Radiology the government opted to dismiss the lawsuit against Dr. Grusd.
The case was investigated by the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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