Woman Arrested for “Doctor Shopping”
Posted on 28. Jan, 2010 in News Stories
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Even though most of our stories are about medical mishaps, this one warrants a two thumbs up for the doctors involved.
Deborah Boutchyard, 51 years old, was arrested this week and charged with eight counts of fraud for using TennCare, Tennesee’s Medicaid managed care program, to illegally obtain medications through “doctor shopping.” She was also charged with theft over $1,000.00.
Doctor shopping refers to a strategy that involves seeing multiple doctors, often at the same time, in order to manipulate the health care system. Although we don’t know the actual medications that Deborah was trying to get, a common scenario would be a patient who visits 5 different doctors for “back pain” in order to get multiple prescriptions for Vicodin, Codeine, or other narcotics.
Like Tennessee, many states are monitoring narcotic prescriptions much more closely.
Tennessee’s Inspector General Deborah Faulkner is happy, “We are enthused with the response we’ve received from physicians across the state in support of cracking down on people who try to doctor shop.”
“Before the ‘doctor shopping’ law, physicians’ hands were tied but now they can report this violation to us and we go after them.”
VeritasAmore
Jan 31st, 2010
One of the reasons Tennessee is on the radar is the VA pharmacist at Murphressboro/Nashville medical centers was arrested once it was determined that the ginormous increase in pharmaceuticals that started showing up in Appalachia were traced back to the VA system in Tennessee, Apparently, the pharmacist in question had one of two keys to the class II narcotics and she was “cooking the books” so to speak to cover her tracks. Eastern KY suffered thru spasms of overdoses, street crime, DUI arrests, broken families, etc. And that was BEFORE these meds showed up in huge quantities.
Donald
Jan 31st, 2010
Wow, I didn’t even know that “doctor-shopping” existed before this.
Johnnie
Jan 31st, 2010
Our surgical office just updated the medication forms that we ask patients to complete when they come in to see one of our surgeons. We have added a question asking every patient if they have been prescribed a narcotic within the last 30 days. Of course, the patients that are “doctor shopping” will simply lie and answer “no”.
Appalachian Nurse
Feb 28th, 2010
Sadly, not every pharmacy submits their CII and CIII prescriptions correctly to the PMP boards. If every since one did and the different states were linked, it would be far more difficult to have something like this happen and far easier to find the culprits.