Former nurse practitioner sentenced in cream scheme
A former Columbus nurse practitioner was sentenced to six months of home confinement and five years of probation Friday for her role in a scheme that involved selling medically unnecessary creams to city employees, first-responders and attendees at the annual Arnold Sports Festival.
Amy Kirk, 44, also must repay about $750,000, but she avoided prison time after pleading guilty in federal court in Columbus earlier this year to a felony count of conspiring to commit health care fraud.
Prosecutors had sought 30 months behind bars for Kirk, but U.S. District Judge Algenon L. Marbley chose probation after questioning a proposed sentence against Kirk’s co-defendant, Ryan D. Edney, 46, of Plain City. Attorney Mark Collins, representing Kirk, noted that prosecutors had recommended probation for Edney, saying that Kirk’s position as a licensed nurse practitioner made the scheme possible.
“I don’t know Mr. Edney’s record, but I do know Mr. Edney’s conduct,” Marbley said. “They are equally culpable….”
According to court documents, Kirk and Edney conspired with others over several years to recruit patients and write prescriptions for compound pain, scar and migraine creams, billing health care plans, Medicaid and other insurance systems.
Kirk often wrote prescriptions without seeing or talking to patients, and the two received nearly $350,000 in kickbacks from the cream sales, according to court documents.
“Even more disturbing was that patients were not requesting the creams, had no medical need for the creams, and many patients had no idea that their insurance companies were being billed,” authorities said in the documents.
City employees were targeted “because government insurance programs were more inclined to pay for” the creams, according to documents. The pair also set up a kiosk at the Arnold Sports Festival to recruit others.
The Dispatch first reported parts of the scheme as part of a yearlong investigation called “Side Effects,” which examined the practice of pharmacy benefit managers that are supposed to closely watch such transactions.