Blog

Fort Wayne Indiana Personal Injury Lawyer and Attorney Blog

Pill-mill Doctor Seeks Medical License Reinstatement

By Jack H. FarnbauchFebruary 28, 2018

A former Logansport doctor, who had been fined $500 by the state for not disclosing he was involved with a malpractice settlement involving the death of a patient, had his fine upheld in late January by the Indiana Medical Licensing Board. Dr. Robert Brewer is trying to have his state medical license renewed although it would be deemed inactive until a suspension is resolved in 2019.

Brewer was part of the pill mill saga of the Wagoner Medical Center sites in Kokomo and Burlington that started back in 2011. During 2011 to 2013, the Wagoner Medical Center had a routine practice of requiring patients seeking a prescription for opioid pills or other pain medicine to submit a urine sample for qualitative testing for the presence or absence of nine or more drugs or drug classes. Using a multiplexed screening kit costing Wagoner Medical Center no more than about $5, their centers tested each single urine sample for the same patient on the same day using the simple kit. 

They billed Indiana Medicaid and received $171.27 per patient, even though Indiana Medicaid billing rules only allowed them to bill $20.83 per patient. Their scheme took in 6,400 claims for an overpayment of $1.1 million. According to police, doctors at the Wagoner Medical Centers also gave prescriptions to patients for narcotics, even after multiple failed drug screens.

The licensing board suspended Brewer's license for four years placing it on inactive status. Since 2013, the Wagoner Medical Center doctors have had at least eight malpractice claims alleging that deaths were caused by overprescribing. 

Read the full story.