Jackson Free Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A nurse pleaded guilty Tuesday to failing to report a crime at a former south Mississippi cancer clinic that was shut down over unsafe practices and accused of a multimillion-dollar health care fraud.

Courtney Michelle Young pleaded guilty to misprision of a felony during a hearing in U.S. District Court in Jackson.

A plea agreement filed in court records said Young faces up to three years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine. U.S. District Judge Daniel Jordan scheduled sentencing for Jan. 6.

Another nurse, Brittany Davis Powell, is scheduled to plead guilty Oct. 21 on the same charge.

Both women worked at the Rose Cancer Center in Summit before it was shut down and its owner, Dr. Meera Sachdeva, sentenced to federal prison for 20 years.

Prosecutors say the nurses failed to report that Sachdeva ordered nurses to make retroactive entries in patients' files.

The U.S. Attorney's office had no comment on Tuesday's guilty plea.

Young's lawyer, Thomas Fortner, said in a phone interview Tuesday that his client "admitted that she failed to report the actions of Dr. Sachdeva when they became known to her."

Fortner pointed out in a previous interview that the nurses were charged only with failing to report a crime related to patient files, not the more serious allegations faced by the clinic, such as reusing syringes on multiple patients.

In sentencing Sachdeva in December, the judge said he found some of the actions at the clinic appalling, such as unqualified technicians performing bone marrow biopsies, the re-use of syringes and multiple patients' chemotherapy drugs being drawn from the same bag.

Prosecutors had initially charged that the clinic watered down chemotherapy drugs, but later said that technology is not advanced enough to determine how much chemotherapy drugs each individual patient had received.

Prosecutors did say, however, that the doctor submitted claims for chemotherapy services that were supposedly given while she was out of the country.

Authorities say the clinic billed Medicaid and Medicare for about $15.1 million during the scheme. In addition to her prison sentence, Sachdeva was ordered to repay nearly $8.2 million after pleading guilty to health care fraud and making false statements.

The Mississippi State Department of Health closed the clinic in July 2012 because of "unsafe infection control practices" after 11 patients were hospitalized with the same bacterial infection.

Besides Sachdeva, two others have been convicted and sentenced in the case.

The office manager, Brittany McCoskey, was sentenced to 13 months in prison and ordered to help pay $55,069 in restitution for making false statements.

Monica Weeks of Madison, who handled the clinic's billing from her Ridgeland firm, Medical Billing Group, was sentenced to three months' house arrest and ordered to help pay $19,550 in restitution.