A New York jury on Wednesday convicted the former CEO of Stimwave, a company that sold devices with dummy pieces of plastic, on two counts of health care fraud. The maximum jail sentence for each count is 20 years.
Laura Perryman led Stimwave, which sold nerve stimulation devices to combat pain, from 2010 to 2019. Under her leadership, Stimwave distorted the design of the device to better fit insurance codes, resulting in unnecessary plastic components that allowed the company to sell its products for thousands of dollars more than it otherwise could. From 2017 to 2020, the company sold nearly 8,000 devices with the non-functioning component.
STAT published new details about the Stimwave story last May, after former employees described how Perryman broke into Stimwave’s Florida headquarters to steal back devices after her termination in 2019. The fraud laid bare the limits of the Food and Drug Administration’s device surveillance system, doctors’ ability to scrutinize device effectiveness, and how impossible it is for patients to get answers about the implants they receive.
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