DOJ Secures Landmark Medicare Fraud Conviction Against HealthSplash CEO
Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice secured a major conviction in the Southern District of Florida against Brett Blackman, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of HealthSplash.
A federal jury found Blackman guilty of operating a software platform that orchestrated a $1 billion scheme to defraud Medicare and other federal health care benefit programs.
This was industrial-scale theft. Blackman, a 42-year-old from Johnson County, Kansas, utilized his company's internet-based platform, Power Mobility Doctor Rx, LLC, to manufacture fraudulent prescriptions and doctors' orders for durable medical equipment, primarily medically unnecessary orthotic braces.
The mechanics of the conspiracy were sophisticated and aggressive. Foreign call centers and spam mailers relentlessly targeted elderly beneficiaries.
Telemedicine companies were then paid illegal kickbacks to sign the bogus prescriptions via the software platform without conducting any meaningful patient examination.
Doctors blatantly ignored medical necessity, sometimes claiming to have performed physical, in-person tests on patients they never even spoke to.
The United States Department of Justice proved this pipeline utilizing an undercover federal agent who posed as a Medicare beneficiary and tracked the fraud from the initial call center push to the doctor signing the bogus order on the platform.
The financial extraction was staggering.
Blackman and his co-conspirators billed federal insurers over $1 billion, successfully securing more than $450 million in payouts before the operation was dismantled.
Blackman actively concealed the scheme using sham contracts and manipulated the doctors' orders specifically to bypass Medicare audits.
The enforcement reality for healthcare tech operators is now stark.
Blackman was convicted of multiple conspiracy charges, including health care and wire fraud, paying and receiving kickbacks, and defrauding the United States.
He faces up to 30 years in federal prison at his scheduled August 26, 2026, sentencing.
His co-defendant, Gary Cox, was previously convicted and sentenced to 15 years.
This massive sentencing exposure sends an immediate shockwave through healthcare venture capital markets, as digital health platforms, remote prescribing arrangements, and technology-driven billing models now carry explicit criminal and civil liability under the False Claims Act.
Startups operating in the telehealth space will be forced into intensive, costly compliance overhauls to avoid being classified as active facilitators of fraud, operational costs that will inevitably raise the baseline price of remote medicine for the average American patient.
This conviction serves as a crucial, high-profile benchmark for the United States Department of Justice's new National Fraud Enforcement Division, which was established on April 7 to aggressively prosecute these exact schemes.
The action directly bolsters President Trump’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, a whole-of-government effort chaired by the Vice President at purging waste and abuse from federal benefit programs.
The liability net here is broad, explicitly capturing the software platforms, pharmacies, marketers, and equipment suppliers that facilitate these interconnected kickback ecosystems.
By treating the software architecture itself as the weapon, federal prosecutors have fundamentally shifted the balance of power in the medical supply chain, transferring the burden of extreme medical vetting squarely onto the shoulders of technology vendors rather than just the prescribing physicians.
