Iowa board revokes nurse’s license for $5 million Medicare-fraud scheme

The state of Iowa has revoked the license of a nurse convicted of conspiring to steal $5 million from the taxpayer-funded Medicare program.

According to state records, Mark Hill, 55, who currently lives in Laurel, Mississippi, was first licensed to practice nursing in Iowa in July 2017.

In September 2020, Hill was indicted in Montana for conspiracy to commit health care fraud.  Prosecutors alleged that from October 2017 through April 2019, Hill provided telehealth consultations with patients for Integrated Support Plus Inc., a telemedicine company located in Florida.

As a Montana-licensed nurse practitioner, Hill allegedly collected bribes from various medical-equipment suppliers in exchange for prescription orders for their products. Many of those prescriptions were not based on any sort of patient examination and sometimes involved no patient interaction at all.

Hill and a co-conspirator were accused of placing orders for 14,700 orthotic braces over 19 months – an average of 865 orders each month, or 29 orders per calendar day. Hill had personally signed about 7,097 of the brace orders, which led to $10 million in charges to the Medicare program, of which Medicare reimbursed $5,054,866. Hill was allegedly paid close to $125,000 for the orders he processed.

In April 2021, Hill pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud. Three months later, he was sentenced to nine months in prison and ordered to pay $5.1 million in restitution.

Six months after Hill entered his guilty plea in the case , the Iowa Board of Nursing charged him with conspiracy to commit health care fraud. The board recently determined the nature and seriousness of Hill’s actions required the “immediate revocation of his license in order to protect the public.”

The board’s action has no practical effect since Hill’s Iowa license expired in 2021.