Christopher Harwood, 44 years old and a resident of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was sentenced this Friday to 20 years in federal prison for organizing and leading a Medicare fraud conspiracy for over six years that resulted in $46.2 million in false claims, according to an announcement by the Department of Justice.
In addition to the prison sentence, the court ordered Harwood to pay nearly 18 million dollars in restitution to Medicare and more than 10.4 million in forfeiture, an amount that equals what he personally gained from the scheme.
Harwood was the owner and operator of a telemedicine company called TelevisitMD, from which he coordinated a network of accomplices that contacted Medicare beneficiaries through aggressive telemarketing campaigns to convince them to accept orthopedic devices and genetic tests they did not need.
The mechanism was systematic: Harwood paid doctors to sign orders for those products without maintaining a real doctor-patient relationship, without a physical examination, and in many cases, without any significant interaction with the patient.
Once she obtained the signatures, she sold those orders to medical equipment companies, laboratories, and marketers who used them to bill Medicare.
At the same time, Harwood directly managed several medical supply companies in Florida—identified in the indictment as West Med, North Med, and South Med—billing millions more for orthopedic devices that patients had neither requested nor needed.
Of the 46.2 million in fraudulent claims filed, Medicare had paid 17.9 million dollars before the scheme was dismantled.
The case was investigated by the FBI from its field office in Miami and by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services. In March 2026, Harwood pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and wire fraud.
Fraud involving telemedicine schemes and medical equipment is a recurring issue in South Florida.
In recent months, other similar cases have resulted in convictions in the region: two residents of the state were sentenced in September for a $34.8 million fraud involving medical equipment, and in June, charges were filed against several individuals in South Florida for similar schemes against the federal program.
The sentence is part of the Department of Justice's Special Units program against Healthcare Fraud, which since 2007 has charged more than 6,200 individuals linked to actions that total over 45 billion dollars in fraudulent billing to federal health programs and private insurers.
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