The owner of a North Texas medical company regularly directed nurses to give hospice patients overdoses of drugs such as morphine to speed up their deaths and maximize profits, an FBI agent wrote in an affidavit for a search warrant obtained by NBC 5.
Brad Harris, 34, an accountant, founded Novus Health Care Services, Inc. in July 2012, state records show. The company, located on Dallas Parkway in Frisco, offers hospice and home health-care services, according to its website.
Harris instructed a nurse to administer overdoses to three patients and directed another employee to increase a patient's medication to four times the maximum allowed, the FBI said. He allegedly sent text messages like, "You need to make this patient go bye-bye."
In the first case, the employee refused to follow Harris' alleged instructions, according to the FBI affidavit. The document does not say whether the other three patients were actually harmed.
Harris also told other health-care executives over a lunch meeting that he wanted to "find patients who would die within 24 hours," and made comments like, "if this f----- would just die," an FBI agent wrote in the warrant.
No charges have been filed against Novus or Harris, who did not return NBC5’s messages left with a receptionist and at his Frisco home.
Health-care providers do not necessarily make more money on longer hospice stays because hospices are subject to an "aggregator cap," which limits Medicare and Medicaid payments based on the yearly average hospice stay, according to the FBI. If patients live too long, the provider can be forced to return part of their payments to the government.
"Hence, hospice providers have an incentive to enroll patients whose hospice stays will be short relative to the cap," an agent wrote in the affidavit.
An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment on the investigation. The agency first began investigating Novus in October 2014 over allegations the company had recruited patients “who did not qualify for services” and billed the government for services that were not medically necessary, according to the affidavit.
An FBI agent investigating the case said he was working with investigators from the Department of Health and Human Services' Inspector General's office.
