Federal prosecutors have secured a 19-year prison sentence against a Kansas businessman who operated an online platform that generated false medical orders to defraud Medicare.
Brett Blackman, 43, of Johnson County, Kansas, was convicted after a 23-day trial on charges including wire fraud, conspiracy to pay and receive kickbacks, and conspiracy to defraud the United States and to make false statements in connection with health care matters, says the U.S. Department of Justice.
Blackman owned HealthSplash, which acquired the DMERx platform in 2017, and his co-defendant Gary Cox was sentenced to 15 years in December 2025.
The platform connected suppliers with doctors who signed orders for unneeded braces without examining patients. The DME suppliers and pharmacies that paid illegal kickbacks for the orders submitted more than $1 billion in claims to Medicare and other insurers, which paid out more than $450 million. Blackman and his co-conspirators hid the scheme through sham contracts and altered doctors’ orders to evade Medicare audits, including by removing references to telemedicine.
The scheme resulted in fraudulent Medicare billing for orthotic braces for more than 346,000 beneficiaries. Medicare was billed for an average of four braces per beneficiary. In more than 1,200 cases, beneficiaries received at least 21 orthotics prescribed through Blackman’s DMERx platform.
Says Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division,
“The Department of Justice and our agency partners dismantled one of the largest telemedicine fraud schemes ever, and yesterday’s lengthy prison sentence holds the orchestrator of that scheme accountable.”
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