Doctor performs needless eye surgery that blinds patient, feds say. She will pay $1.8M

A doctor in Georgia is accused of performing eye surgeries on patients without valid medical reasons, including on one who became legally blind in her left eye afterward, federal prosecutors said.

For five years, Dr. Aarti D. Pandya, who runs a practice in Conyers, performed needless cataract extraction surgeries that occasionally injured patients and billed the government for the procedures, officials said. In other cases, she is accused of lying and telling patients they had the eye disease glaucoma to perform unnecessary tests on them that she also billed the government for, prosecutors said.

Now Pandya and her practice are paying $1.85 million to settle lengthy accusations against her after a whistleblower, her former employee, filed a lawsuit against her and Pandya Practice Group, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced in a Jan. 9 news release.

McClatchy News contacted attorneys representing Pandya for comment on Jan. 9 and didn’t immediately receive a response.

“Physicians who perform procedures and tests without a legitimate medical need place profits ahead of patients and subject those patients to unnecessary risk,” U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan said in a statement.

Pandya caused the government to pay for unnecessary procedures and diagnostic tests by submitting false claims to health agencies including Medicare, prosecutors said. Doing so violates the False Claims Act.

Several of the diagnostic tests Pandya ordered “were performed on a broken machine” or were performed incorrectly, officials said.

Patient undergoes unnecessary cataract surgeries

In 2011, a patient started seeing Pandya after she took over another doctor’s practice, a complaint filed by the government states. This patient had seen the former doctor for more than 15 years until his retirement.

Although the patient was diagnosed with cataracts in 2003, her eyesight was not “negatively” affected, the complaint states. Still, this patient’s cataracts were monitored every year.

Cataracts can get worse over time and are identified when a person’s eye lens becomes cloudy, according to the National Eye Institute.

The patient, who wasn’t having issues with her eyesight, had her first visit with Pandya because her eyes were watering on March 18, 2011, according to the complaint. At the time, her vision was 20/20 in her right eye and 20/30 in her left eye, prosecutors said.

Without documenting the patient’s cataracts in medical records, Pandya ordered the patient to undergo cataract surgery, the complaint states. This was because she saw the patient had diabetic retinopathy, which affects the eyes, but still “took no steps to determine whether this condition might be the cause of any vision problems,” prosecutors said.

After Pandya performed cataract surgeries in both eyes, the patient’s left eye had “significant vision loss” with a vision of 20/400 instead of her previous 20/30, according to the complaint.

This made her legally blind in her left eye, as the Social Security Administration considers legal blindness at 20/200 or less, prosecutors said.

“Dr. Pandya performed cataract surgery on both of (the patient’s) eyes despite observing no objective measures of vision loss in the patient, and despite (the patient’s) belief that she had no vision problems,” the complaint states. “These surgeries were therefore not reasonable and necessary to treat the patient’s condition.”

Pandya billed Medicare for this procedure, and the government argues the agency wouldn’t have paid for the surgery since it wasn’t needed.

“Subjecting individuals to extraneous procedures just to bilk the health care programs on which they rely is the antithesis of proper medical care,” Special Agent in Charge Tamala E. Miles, of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, said in a statement.

Pandya’s practice is still active, and a profile listed for Dr. Aarti Pandya under the Piedmont Healthcare organization’s website says she is accepting new patients.

Conyers is about 25 miles east of Atlanta.

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