According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 58-year-old Scharmaine Lawson Baker served as a nurse practitioner and was an enrolled Medicare provider. She was convicted for ordering medically unnecessary cancer genetic tests for hundreds of patients she never met or examined.
Baker was convicted on six counts of healthcare fraud. She is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 19 and faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison on each count. A federal district court judge will determine her sentence.
“Scharmaine Lawson Baker shamelessly exploited her medical license and the trust of vulnerable patients to enrich herself through a multi-million-dollar genetic testing fraud,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti.
According to the Department of Justice, from 2018 to 2019, Baker worked as an independent contractor for a company that claimed to provide telehealth services. She reportedly signed hundreds of orders for medically unnecessary cancer genetic testing after brief phone calls, typically lasting less than a minute, without conducting any physical exams of patients.
Court documents state Baker falsely diagnosed patients to justify the unnecessary tests, such as diagnosing male patients with cervical cancer they did not have. Baker never reviewed any of the test results, including when the results showed that patients actually had variants predisposing them to certain cancers.
Department of Justice officials said Baker mislead patients into thinking they were being screened for cancer at no cost, despite the tests ordered not actually diagnosing patients with existing cancer.
In total, Baker caused over $12.1 million fraudulent Medicare claims and the labs involved in the scheme reportedly received over $1.5 million in reimbursements for unnecessary testing.
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