A few clouds. Low 67F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph..

A few clouds. Low 67F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A former Joplin doctor pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to making false claims regarding more than 2,000 Medicare and Medicaid patients.

Oluwatobi Alabi Yerokun, 36, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Kansas City to conspiring to cheat the government by falsely asserting that certain products and tests were medically necessary for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries with whom he had no doctor-patient relationship.

“This physician violated his oath and abused his trusted position to support a fraud scheme that cost taxpayers millions of dollars,” U.S. Attorney Teresa Moore said in a news release.

Moore said Yerokun played “a specific and essential role” in a health care scheme that remains under investigation, with more prosecutions anticipated “in courtrooms across the nation.”

According to the U.S. attorney’s office, participants in the scheme targeted the Medicare and Medicaid programs for reimbursements between February 2019 and April 2021.

Yerokun, who currently resides in Washington, D.C., but formerly practiced medicine in Joplin, contracted with a staffing company to be a telemedicine provider. The business — identified in court documents as Company A — gave Yerokun online access to information about patients assigned to him, which he used to sign patient forms and write orders for medical equipment and genetic tests.

The U.S. attorney’s office said that by pleading guilty, Yerokun admitted that he signed the forms and certified that the tests and equipment were medically necessary without ever seeing or communicating with the patients, that he made no efforts to find out how that information was obtained or if it was complete or even accurate, and that he never attempted any follow-up care with the patients.

Yerokun “rarely, if ever,” declined to sign orders for Company A, the U.S. attorney’s office said, and would often spend less than a minute assessing the patient information he received online before signing an order.

His orders were submitted to durable medical equipment companies and clinical testing laboratories that would then make illegal kickback payments to individuals and other entities involved in the scheme, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

Yerokun signed durable equipment orders for 2,186 Medicare beneficiaries during the two-year span in question and was paid $20 for each order for a net personal gain of $44,860. His orders caused Medicare to be billed for more than $6.2 million, almost half of which was paid by the program.

With respect to the Medicaid beneficiaries on whom he signed genetic testing orders, that program was billed more than $2.5 million by laboratories. The U.S. attorney’s office said those laboratories were paid almost $525,000.

Former Joplin physician Oluwatobi Yerokun faces up to five years in prison for his role in a Medicare and Medicaid fraud scheme that has been under investigation by the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Jeff Lehr is an award-winning reporter for The Joplin Globe who covers the courts and crime beat. He can be reached at jlehr@joplinglobe.com.

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