A federal jury convicted a Louisiana nurse practitioner for her role in an over $12.1 million healthcare fraud scheme to defraud Medicare by ordering medically unnecessary cancer genetic tests for hundreds of patients she never met or examined. According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Scharmaine Lawson Baker, 58, of Richmond, Texas, served as a nurse practitioner and was an enrolled Medicare provider. She held herself out as an expert in Medicare regulations — authoring publications on medical necessity and patient-provider relationships — while actively violating those very standards. From 2018 to 2019, Lawson Baker worked as an independent contractor for a company that claimed to provide telehealth services. In her role, the defendant signed hundreds of orders for medically unnecessary cancer genetic testing after brief phone calls — typically lasting less than 60 seconds — and without conducting any physical exams of patients. Lawson Baker falsely diagnosed patients to justify the unnecessary tests, such as diagnosing male patients with cervical cancer that they did not have. Lawson Baker never reviewed any of the test results, including when the results showed that patients actually had variants predisposing them to certain cancers.
In furtherance of the scheme, Lawson Baker participated in phone calls misleading patients into believing they were being screened for cancer at no cost, despite the tests ordered not actually diagnosing patients with existing cancer. In doing so, she exploited the trust placed in licensed healthcare professionals and manipulated vulnerable patients. In total, Lawson Baker caused over $12.1 million in fraudulent Medicare claims and the labs involved in the scheme received over $1.5 million in reimbursements for unnecessary testing. In exchange for signing these orders, Lawson Baker accepted kickbacks and bribes from the telehealth company – payments she later failed to disclose in her bankruptcy petition.