An Indian-origin former chief financial officer of a US spinal implant company has been sentenced to four months in prison for bribing surgeons to use the company’s products in exchange for sham consulting fees, authorities said.Aditya Humad, 41, a Cambridge resident and former CFO of SpineFrontier Inc., will serve four months in prison, followed by one year of supervised release, and pay a USD 9,500 fine.Humad had earlier pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate the federal anti-kickback statute. He was charged in September 2021 along with Kingsley R Chin, SpineFrontier’s founder, president and CEO.According to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, Humad conspired to pay and direct the payment of more than USD 540,000 in bribes to surgeons through sham consulting fees for work they did not perform.The payments were intended to induce surgeons to use SpineFrontier’s spinal products during surgeries. The company, in turn, generated millions of dollars in revenue from procedures performed by the surgeons, authorities said.“This sentence is the culmination of years of dogged pursuit of SpineFrontier, its executives, Aditya Humad and Kingsley Chin, and multiple bribe-taking doctors,” United States Attorney Leah B Foley said, according to news agency PTI.Foley said Humad had been convicted and sentenced for conspiring to pay bribes to physicians to induce them to use the company’s products in complicated spine surgeries.“In criminal and civil proceedings, we have recovered more than USD four million from these executives, their companies and the physicians who took their bribes. Let these resolutions serve as notice that no matter how long it takes, and how sophisticated the scheme, we will crack down on health care fraud offences,” Foley added.Authorities said Humad and SpineFrontier entered into contracts with surgeons that purportedly paid between USD 250 and USD 1,000 an hour for technical feedback on the company’s products.Prosecutors, however, said the consulting arrangements were used to facilitate payments to surgeons in exchange for using SpineFrontier products in surgeries, including procedures covered by Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Health Administration.The surgeons often spent only a small portion of the hours they reported, if any, performing actual consulting work, prosecutors said.SpineFrontier subsequently received millions of dollars in revenue from surgeries performed by the doctors, according to authorities.“This corporate scheme sought to corruptly influence surgeons by paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to induce the use of SpineFrontier’s medical devices in surgeries,” Roberto Coviello, special agent in charge at the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS OIG), the agency reported. Coviello said Humad’s actions undermined safeguards intended to protect patients and the integrity of taxpayer-funded healthcare programmes.
