The individuals concerned were charged with various crimes including conspiracy to defraud the Medicare programme, false claims and money laundering, administration officials said. The alleged schemes involved various medical treatments, tests and services, such as home health care, physical and occupational therapy and medical equipment. These schemes were targeted to the 45 million elderly and disabled Americans who are enrolled in taxpayer-funded Medicare schemes.

In one instance, a podiatrist practising in Detroit was accused of billing Medicare for around $700,000 for costly and unnecessary procedures, such as charging Medicare for 20 nail removals on three toes of just one patient.

Three physical therapy clinics in Brooklyn, which were run by an organised network of Russian immigrants were also discovered. They are accused of paying people to find elderly patients to treat with inappropriate and ineffective physical therapy, accruing approximately $57million through this fraudulent process.

Statements from the FBI revealed that  2,600 health care fraud cases were currently under investigation and that organised crime groups have been increasingly linked to the alleged schemes. Fraud is thought to have accounted for as much as $60billion a year in the Medicare programme, with just $4billion of this recovered last year by the government’s Medicare Fraud Strike Force.

Medicare has come increasingly under fire from critics who believe the government pays too much to the companies running the schemes which leaves them open to fraudulent activity. Whilst the NHS operates on a vastly reduced scale with a different organisational structure, instances of fraud have still been documented.

To prevent such levels of fraudulent activity being able to occur within the UK, it is imperative that services such as Orthotics are correctly run, where currently the equipment ordering, tracking and delivery processes not monitored to a high level of efficiency. The implementation of an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system such as Therapy Manager can ensure that all equipment is tracked throughout the entire equipment ordering and distribution process which also has the ability to ensure that staff are set appropriate order thresholds, reducing the opportunity for fraud.