March 5, 2020 / By Alex Newman, Patch Staff
MALDEN, MA — The U.S. Attorney’s office has filed a civil health care fraud complaint against Malden-based spinal device company SpineFrontier, Inc. The company’s founder and CEO, Kingsley Chin, and CFO Aditya Humad are accused of paying and conspiring to pay kickbacks to surgeons in the form of sham consulting fees through consulting firm Impartial Medical Experts, LLC.
Authorities say Impartial Medical Experts (IME) is a sham third-party firm. Chin’s wife, Vanessa Dudley, is the business administrator for the firm and has been named in the lawsuit, along with IME and other entities Chin owns and controls, according to the USAO.
SpineFrontier and IME are accused of paying more than $8 million in kickbacks to surgeons, which generated more than $100 million in revenue, with the vast majority of SpineFrontier’s total domestic sales revenues coming from kickback-tainted surgeries, according to the USAO.
The lawsuit alleges that payments were made to surgeons to induce them to use SpineFrontier’s devices in spinal surgeries. The defendants are accused of violating the Anti-Kickback Statute, costing federal health care programs millions of dollars in false claims, according to the USAO.
The USAO has settled civil health care fraud claims against five doctors who admitted to receiving kickbacks from SpineFrontier through IME for consulting work they did not do, federal authorities say.
