Lab Fined $400,000 For Running Unnecessary Urine Tests

SOUTHBRIDGE, MA—A Southbridge clinical lab is forking over more than $400,000 to resolve claims that it billed MassHealth for urine drug screens that weren't medically necessary, Attorney General Maura Healey announced today.

Precision Testing Laboratories, based in Southbridge, and owner David Fromm, of Hull, agreed to make the payment in a settlement agreement with the attorney general’s office. The company and Fromm are also suspended from participating in MassHealth for 10 years. Neither is currently doing business as a health care provider in Massachusetts.

“Medicaid fraud schemes cheat taxpayers and take critical health care resources away from the people that need them most,” said AG Healey in a statement. “We will go after cases of fraud and return the funds to the state.”

The AG’s Office began an investigation after the matter was referred by MassHealth, said the announcement. The investigation by the AG’s Medicaid Fraud Division concluded that PTL billed MassHealth for expensive, quantitative urine drug tests as a routine and medically unnecessary supplement to less expensive, qualitative urine drug screens.

Investigators also found that the company aggressively marked complex drug testing packages to sober houses, even though they knew that the tests were for residential sobriety monitoring.

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