The owner of five Western Virginia pain clinics closed by the feds in 2023 in the midst of an investigation into drug and healthcare fraud was sentenced on Friday to 45 months in prison, and as part of the sentence, agreed to pay more than $5 million in fines and restitution.
The story, which feels like it’s torn from the pages of the Beth Macy bestseller Dopesick, involves a former mortgage broker named Greg Barnes, 59, a South Carolina man who, in 2014, bought a medical practice through his company, L5 Medical Holdings, which he used to operate what we call, euphemistically, pain management clinics.
According to court documents, Barnes conducted a feasibility study that identified Lynchburg as a prime location for his initial pain management clinic.
The whole thing was about volume – the L5 pain management clinics focused on prescribing Suboxone and opioids, with the emphasis on prioritizing revenue maximization over patient care; providers were encouraged to limit patient visits to 15 minutes and to see as many as 30 patients per day.
At Barnes’s direction, medical providers with L5 followed the opinion of non-medical professionals in making medical decisions, including whether a patient should be treated for opioid addiction or for pain management, whether a patient should receive a prescription, and what type of drug should be prescribed.
That part was morally and ethically murky; the part that ran into criminal exposure involved patient interactions with non-medical professionals being improperly billed to Medicaid and Medicare, including by billing under providers who had not seen the patient.
On some occasions, according to the court documents, L5 employees billed insurance for patient visits under the name of doctors who were not even in the same city or state as the patient.
L5 also implemented a urine drug testing policy principally based on insurance reimbursements rather than patient care – specifically, to order the maximum amount of drug tests that insurance policies would pay for, regardless of medical need.
To avoid losing millions of dollars in revenue that resulted from charging Medicare and Medicaid under that bill-to-the-max policy, Barnes and L5 refused to implement a random drug testing policy, even when advised by medical professionals to do so.
Barnes pleaded guilty in 2023 to conspiring to commit healthcare fraud, distribute Suboxone without a legitimate medical purpose, and use DEA registration numbers of other people to distribute controlled substances.
L5 also pleaded guilty to the same crimes, as well as conspiracy to distribute fentanyl, oxycodone, hydrocodone and morphine without a legitimate medical purpose.
Barnes had been the last defendant awaiting sentencing as part of Operation Mountain Highlands – an investigation that resulted in convictions and years of prison time for a half-dozen medical professionals and businesspeople associated with the L5 pain clinics.
Other convictions and sentences as a result of Operation Mountain Highlands include:
- Duane Dixon, a former doctor at L5, who pled guilty to concealing healthcare fraud and conspiring to illegally prescribed highly addictive opioid painkillers to at-risk patients, was sentenced to 40 months in prison in June, and ordered to pay over $1 million in fines and restitution.
- Jennifer Adams, L5’s former chief operating officer, was sentenced to 36 months in federal prison for her role in concealing and assisting with L5’s schemes. Adams was also ordered to pay over $3 million in restitution.
- Charles Wilson Adams (no relation to Jennifer Adams), who was falsely held out as a medical doctor and made treatment recommendations for L5 patients, received a 24-month prison sentence and was ordered to pay $30,000 in fines and forfeiture.
- Wendell Randall, a former doctor who rented out his credentials to others at L5 so they could prescribe Suboxone, but was himself rarely physically present at L5 clinics, was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2024.
- Debra Shaffer, a nurse practitioner with L5, was sentenced to jail time and a $5,000 fine in 2023.