LANCASTER, Pa. — A grand jury voted Monday to charge a Lancaster psychiatrist with issuing prescriptions for controlled substances without seeing or monitoring patients, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro announced.
Bassam El-Borno, MD, is charged with felony violations of the Drug Act for prescribing outside the good faith of medicine, Medicaid fraud, theft by deception, insurance fraud, and a violation of the Wiretap Act, Shapiro said.
“Stopping this doctor from continually prescribing addictive and dangerous medications means we won a battle, but it is not the end of the work we need to do,” Shapiro said in a press release. “My Office will continue to hold individuals accountable who recklessly put the lives of others at risk for profit, wherever those individuals are found.”
El-Borno is accused of consistently prescribing Adderall and Ritalin, addictive Schedule II controlled substances, to multiple patients for years without a proper evaluation, diagnosis, or ongoing assessment of the patient, Shaprio said.
He allegedly charged patients $50 or $75 cash per prescription, often mailing the prescriptions or taping the prescriptions in envelopes outside the office and generally without an office visit or any contact whatsoever with the doctor, according to Shapiro.
One allegedly patient told agents that El-Borno mailed 11 prescriptions for Ritalin over the course of a year for her seven year old child without him ever meeting, seeing or even speaking to the child, Shapiro said.
For another patient, El-Borno allegedly wrote more than 70 Adderall prescriptions without ever meeting or seeing him and based solely on the man’s wife telling El-Borno on a phone call that she thought her husband “could use the drug," according to Shapiro.
El-Borno would joke about being a “drug dealer,” and his patients being “addicts,” when prescribing these medications to patients, Shapiro said..
He also billed Medicaid and other insurance for office visits that did not occur, according to Shapiro.
A medical expert specializing in psychiatry reviewed patient files, prescription data and patient interviews obtained during this investigation. The doctor opined that El-Borno continually prescribed patients the Schedule II stimulant medications, Ritalin and Adderall, however, there was no evidence that a clinical assessment of the patients was done, there was no ongoing clinical contact with the patients and the prescribing was not done in good faith or by the standards expected of doctors, Shapiro said.
