A Baltimore County Circuit judge sentenced a clinical laboratory owner to five years in prison yesterday for bilking Medicaid and health insurers out of more than $100,000 by performing almost 9,000 unneeded blood tests.
Tasaduq S. Husain, 43, owner of the now-defunct Tyco Clinical Laboratories Inc. in Catonsville, was found guilty of 10 counts of felony theft, two counts of felony Medicaid fraud and one count of violating quality assurance codes.
Assistant Attorney General Carolyn McElroy said Husain performed more than 8,800 unauthorized ferritin and thyroxine tests -- which measure iron and thyroid functions -- on about 4,000 patients from 1991 to 1993. The iron tests, according to physicians who testified in his two-week November trial, should be administered only on rare occasions. And the physicians testified that the thyroid tests were useless unless a companion test also was administered. Husain never performed the companion tests, Ms. McElroy said.
Judge James T. Smith Jr. sentenced Husain, of the 3100 block of Nestling Pine Court in Ellicott City, to two five-year sentences to be served consecutively but suspended five years in lieu of $161,000 restitution.
Tyco Clinical Laboratories Inc. also was fined $11,000.
Court records show the scheme worked like this:
Husain would receive orders from doctors across the county to perform a basic chemical test panel which measured about 20 basic tests such as liver function and cholesterol.
Husain would alter requisition forms that asked for the basic panel by adding ferritin and thyroxine tests. The results of the added tests would be buried into the other results. The physicians either didn't notice the unauthorized tests or believed that the tests had been performed automatically in the lab, Ms. McElroy said.
Husain would then bill the insurance companies who assumed that the physicians had ordered the tests.
The basic panel costs about $15. The ferritin tests run $21 to $60 and the thyroxine tests $11 to $60. The fraudulent billings accounted for more than a quarter of the laboratory's income, Ms. McElroy said.
Husain's scheme fell apart in the summer of 1993 when Medicaid Fraud Control officials performed random statewide computer tests to tally what tests were being performed by physicians. Roughly 98 percent of Husain's testing included ferritin and thyroxine tests.