Healthcare Investigations at Warp Speed

We covered one of the U.S. Justice Department’s major healthcare sweeps last month.

But we didn’t know the feds had shut things down with such blinding speed. Reportedly, it took them six to eight months from first alert to coordinated raids. The investigation is said to have begun earlier this year when analysts detected a surge in claims for expensive genetic tests. By September, prosecutors had presented the case to a grand jury. For a complex criminal case? That’s fast.

And it’s all due to data analytics. Or data mining. Whatever you want to call it. It’s become the foundation for how the government investigates these cases, according to prosecutors from the Department’s fraud section. It “points us in the right direction,” “even allows us to act in real time,” and helps target “the head of the snake,” they say. It can be a lot faster than building cases on tips from whistleblowers or cooperating witnesses, and like we’ve said before, it’ll only get faster over time.