“I think that they were running a scheme to hold people as long as possible, to bill their insurance as long as possible before kicking them out the door, and then filling the bed with someone else,” said lawyer Aaron Cash, who is representing a patient.
William VanWhy says he was feeling emotionally overwhelmed when he checked himself into the mental health unit at Northwest Medical Center in Arkansas last year. Four days later, he was still in the locked unit but desperate to leave.Mental health patients in Arkansas can be held against their will for 72 hours if they are deemed a danger to themselves or to others. But to keep them any longer than that, a medical provider must file a court petition and get the consent of a judge.
VanWhy was released about 20 minutes later. “Oh my gosh. You saved my life,” he told the deputy, the bodycam footage shows.The man who led the unit at the time, Dr. Brian Hyatt, was one of the most prominent psychiatrists in Arkansas and the chairman of the board that disciplines physicians. But he’s now under investigation by state and federal authorities who are probing allegations ranging from Medicaid fraud to false imprisonment.
in late May after Drug Enforcement Administration agents executed a search warrant at his private practice. “While it is not our practice to comment on pending litigation matters, I can share that last spring, we undertook a number of actions to ensure our patients’ safety, including hiring new providers responsible for the clinical care of our behavioral health patients in early May 2022,” Morrell added.
The number of beds expanded from 25 to 75, and the claims to Medicaid and Medicare, as well as to private insurance, surged, according to the Arkansas attorney general’s search warrant affidavit. Investigators reviewed 45 days of surveillance footage from the facility and concluded that Hyatt entered a patient’s room or interacted with a patient only 17 times — for less than 10 minutes in total, according to the report prepared by the attorney general.
According to the search warrant affidavit, Hyatt’s Medicaid claims dwarfed those of other psychiatrists in Arkansas.“Dr. Hyatt is a clear outlier, and his claims are so high they skew the averages on certain codes for the entire Medicaid program in Arkansas,” the affidavit says. Adrian-Caceres had arrived at the unit the day before and was clamoring to leave, according to a lawsuit she filed in January 2023.
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