After a federal investigation unearthed billing fraud within the department of radiology in the School of Medicine, two doctors stepped down and School of Medicine Dean Bob Churchill announced he is retiring in October.
Two radiologists, Dr. Kenneth Rall and Dr. Michael Richards, were signing off on X-rays they had never seen. They were supposed to check another doctor’s work, a check required by the hospital and for a patient to receive Medicare and other kinds of health insurance.
By skipping this step, Rall and Richards not only cheated the federal government out of money, they put patients’ lives at risk. The hospital has said the fraud didn’t compromise any patient’s health, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have. By deciding to neglect their work, these doctors left patients’ health to chance, blindly approving another doctor’s diagnosis. MU is lucky the repercussions for Rall and Richard’s actions deal only in money and reputation and not in loss of life.
Rall and Richards not only disregarded patients’ health—they cost the federal government an unknown amount of money. And for Rall, it wasn’t the first time. In 1986, he was charged with embezzling by using “lag time between banks to inflate the balance of one account with non-existing funds from another” and writing Medicaid checks to patients and then signing them back to himself, according to the Columbia Tribune. All of this happened at the School of Medicine, but Churchill still rehired Rall. One radiologist said he wasn’t surprised at Rall’s actions, the Tribune article stated. With so many warnings, Rall’s employment should have been evaluated a long time ago.
These professionals’ actions don’t just taint their medical careers. They hurt the entire reputation the School of Medicine and the UM System have established through their work. With the negative press generated from the controversy, the School of Medicine will need to make significant improvements in order to rebuild the reputation of the program.
So far, the School of Medicine is taking steps to keep a situation like this from ever happening again. These doctors’ actions could have been prevented, and it seems like the School of Medicine is starting to realize that. Technology exists that would have forced them to perform these checks, and the hiring process could have been stricter. The hospital is looking into solutions to these problems now, but it’s unfortunate the changes have to come after an incident like this.
The hospital is offering to pay for X-rays conducted by independent sources for patients who were affected by the fraud, putting safeguards in the programs physicians use to review images and hiring independent radiology experts to review its entire operating process. Since Rall and Richards are being dealt with by the federal government, making sure their actions are preventable is a good first step in rebuilding the hospital’s credibility.
