Janesville Physician Sentenced for Prescription Drug Fraud
| U.S. Attorney’s Office April 16, 2014 |
MADISON, WI—John W. Vaudreuil, United States Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin, announced that Richard Barney, 53, of Janesville, Wisconsin, was sentenced today by U.S. District Judge Adelman to two years of probation and a $3,000 fine for prescription fraud. Barney pleaded guilty to this charge on December 17, 2013. In addition to these penalties, the defendant agreed to surrender his DEA registrations that allow him to prescribe controlled substances and not to reapply for new ones for three years.
In 2012, Beloit Memorial Hospital and Northpointe Hospital in Rockton, Illinois, used Instymed machines to dispense prescriptions to patients. To prescribe medication through an Instymed machine, the prescribing doctor sends a prescription to the machine from a computer terminal. The patient can then pick up the medication at the machine by entering some codes and paying for the medications, either with cash or a credit card.
In April 2013, a staff member at Northpointe Hospital saw a prescription for Percocet submitted to the Instymed machine by the defendant. She realized the defendant did not work that day, and hospital officials began investigating. A video recording of the area showed the defendant taking a prescription from the Instymed machine.
Investigators then began looking at all the defendant’s Percocet prescriptions at Northpointe and Beloit Memorial Hospital and speaking to the patients who had supposedly received Percocet. They determined that there were times the defendant wrote Percocet prescriptions for patients he had not seen and times he had paid for prescriptions with his own credit card. The defendant obtained prescriptions this way approximately 95 times.
The charges against Barney were the result of an investigation conducted by Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Roscoe (Illinois) Police Department, and Beloit Police Department. The prosecution of the case has been handled by Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Altman.