A federal jury in the Southern District of Florida convicted the founder and owner of HealthSplash for his role in operating a platform that generated false doctors’ orders and prescriptions to defraud Medicare and other federal healthcare benefit programs out of more than $1 billion. According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Brett Blackman, 42, of Johnson County, Kansas, and his co-conspirators aggressively targeted hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries to get them to accept medically unnecessary orthotic braces and other items. They then arranged for purported telemedicine doctors to sign bogus prescription orders for these items, so that their co-conspirators could bill Medicare for them. All told, Blackman and his co-conspirators billed Medicare and other federal healthcare benefit programs over $1 billion for this unnecessary equipment.