Troubled AeroVanti founder faces new civil allegations in Medicare fraud case

Patrick Britton-Harr, the founder of a membership-based private air service company based partially in Sarasota that’s grappling with a bevy of lawsuits and fraud allegations, is facing new legal troubles: The U.S. Department of Justice, through the FBI’s Baltimore field office, filed a civil complaint July 18 alleging he submitted “claims to Medicare for laboratory tests that were not ordered by health care providers, not medically necessary and sometimes never performed.” 

The case against Britton-Harr, filed under the False Claims Act, does not allege any criminal misconduct. The complaint contends that Britton-Harr, owner and operator of Provista Health LLC as well as multiple other corporate entities, sought to profit from the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic by “offering COVID-19 tests to nursing homes as a way to bill Medicare for a wide array of medically unnecessary respiratory pathogen panel (RPP) tests.” These RPP tests were not medically necessary, the complaint alleges, because the “beneficiaries had no symptoms of a respiratory illness and because the tests were for uncommon respiratory pathogens.”

The complaint also alleges Britton-Harr and Provista Health submitted claims for RPP tests that were never ordered by physicians. Federal officials allege that “multiple physicians denied ever ordering the thousands of RPP tests for which Britton-Harr and Provista Health allegedly submitted claims to Medicare listing one of these physicians as the ordering provider.” The complaint further alleges Britton-Harr and Provista Health submitted claims to Medicare for RPP tests that were never performed, including over 300 claims that stated that the nasal swab test sample was supposedly collected from the beneficiary on a date after the beneficiary had died.