Ayushman Bharat Fraud: Rajkot Paediatrician expelled for manipulating reports, extracting Rs 2.53 crore

Rajkot: Taking action against a paediatrician for allegedly manipulating the reports of newborns to extract a huge sum of money from the Government’s Ayushman Bharat Scheme, the State health department recently expelled him from the Ayushman Card scheme of health insurance.

This comes after the insurance company and the health department found that the doctor had been involved in unethical behaviour. This included tampering with medical records to portray patients' conditions negatively, thus exaggerating the severity of their health issues.

The doctor running Nihit Babycare Hospital at Rajkot in Gujarat was accused of having admitted perfectly healthy children to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) to fraudulently obtain funds from the Ayushman scheme.

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As per the Desh Gujarat news report, the doctor will first verify if the patient's family is covered by the Ayushman card scheme. Once it is confirmed that the family is a beneficiary of the scheme, he will gather samples from the child and send them to the Mangalam laboratory.

Subsequently, the reports will be reviewed and the child will be admitted to the NICU for 7-10 days. The information would be uploaded to the government portal of the Ayushman scheme, and a claim of Rs. 9,000 to Rs. 10,000 per day would be made under the scheme.

So far, a total of 1483 children have been admitted to his hospital under the scheme which was linked with his hospital two years ago. However, the doctor had shown a record of 523 admissions, for which he has claimed Rs. 2.53 crore.

It is estimated that he obtained the amount in a short period of only 8 months by providing unnecessary medical treatment to the infants using this method, according to VOI.

His attempt to continuously deceive the government failed when Mr Imran Houthi of Divya Bhaskar brought the incident to light. This ex-employee revealed how the accused doctor admitted children into the hospital by intentionally creating falsified negative reports.

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