Psychiatrist 'locks patients in hospital units and pretends to visit in scam'
A psychiatrist is accused of locking patients in hospital units for several days and sometimes weeks and pretending to visit them as part of an $800,000 scam, a lawsuit has claimed.
Dr Brian Hyatt, 50, from Arkansas, is accused of holding at least 26 victims in his unit at Northwest Medical Centre - with one former patient claiming they were grabbed and held for five days against their will.
Under Arkansas law stating mental health patients can be held against their will for 72 hours if they are deemed a danger to themselves or others.
But in order to keep patients longer, a medical provider must file a court petition which has the judge's consent.
However, in at least two cases, a patient was only released from Dr Hyatt's care after a sheriff's duty showed up with a court order.
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CCTV footage allegedly showed Dr Hyatt skipped patients' rooms while he was on the floor (NBC WS)The Arkansas Attorney General's office claims Dr Hyatt ran an insurance scam to treat patients he rarely visited and then charged the "highest severity code on every patient" in order to take home hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Northwest Medical Centre also could not provide sufficient documentation that justified the hospitalisation of 246 patients.
Aaron Cash, a lawyer representing several of Dr Hyatt's former patients, said: "I think that they were running a scheme to hold people as long as possible, to bill their insurance as long as possible before kicking them out the door, and then filling the bed with someone else."
Victims claim he would barely visit them (NBC WS)Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said under the doctor's leadership, the number of beds expanded from 25 to 75 along with claims to Medicaid and Medicare, which made him $1,3367 per day.
Investigators accused him of submitting claims to agencies for reimbursement. He also said he conducted daily face-to face evaluations with patients at his hospital.
But in April 2022, a former staff member told police Dr Hyatt was only on the floor with patients "a few minutes each day and had no contact with patients".
Cops then studied 45 days of CCTV from the hospital and found that he only entered a patient's room or interacted with a patient 17 times - for less than ten minutes in total.
Psychiatrist Dr Brian Hyatt is under investigation for Medicaid fraud and false imprisonment of patients (US News)The affidavit says: "Dr Hyatt never had even a single conversation with the vast majority of patients under his care."
However, from January 2019 through to June 2022, Medicaid paid out more than $800,000 for his unit.
"Dr Hyatt is a clear outlier, and his claims are so high they skew the averages on certain codes or the entire Medicaid program in Arkansas.
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"According to the claims submitted by Dr Hyatt and the non-physician providers working under his supervision, no patient being treated in the behavioural unit located at Northwest Medical Centre ever got better, at least not before the day of the patient's release," the affidavit claims.
The federally-funded health insurance uses a coding system for Americans in poverty to determine how much pay it provides - with the highest codes charging the most as those patients need more care.
According to the Attorney General, 99.5 per cent of the claims Dr Hyatt's unit sent to Medicaid were the most expensive codes.
From January 2019 through to June 2022, Medicaid paid out more than $800,000 for his unit (NBC WS)One victim, who was held for five days, told NBC: "They sent in four nurses, techs and they each grabbed my arms and my legs and held me down on my stomach and shot me up with a sedative."
Dr Hyatt was named the medical director of Northwest Medical Centre's behavioural unit in January 2018. He was also running his own private practice, Pinnacle Premier Psychiatry, 25 miles away from the hospital.
However, he has since resigned from his position as chairman of the Arkansas State Medical Board and was "abruptly terminated" from his position at the hospital.
He denies any wrongdoing and has not been charged.
Northwest Medical Centre, who also deny wrongdoing, said in a statement: “We believe hospital personnel complied in all respects with Arkansas law, which heavily relies on the treating physician’s assessment of the patient, including in decisions related to involuntary commitment.
“While it is not our practice to comment on pending litigation matters, I can share that last spring, we undertook a number of actions to ensure our patients’ safety, including hiring new providers responsible for the clinical care of our behavioural health patients in early May 2022."
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