TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Julia Wilburn on Mar 28, 2023

A federal whistleblower lawsuit filed against Erlanger Health System accuses hospital leaders of illegal billing practices by knowingly overlapping surgeries and allowing trainees to operate on patients without physician supervision, among other patient safety and compliance issues. The Chattanooga Times Free Press reports that the complaint, brought under the federal False Claims Act and Tennessee Medicaid False Claims Act and filed in April 2021 in federal district court, alleges that surgeons who practice at Erlanger violated state and federal law by regularly billing for two or three different surgeries in the same timeframe while leaving residents and interns alone to complete operations without proper oversight or patient consent.