Health Care Software CEO Brett Blackman Sentenced to 19 Years for a $1 Billion Medicare Fraud Run Through the DMERx Telemedicine Order Platform

A health care software executive who prosecutors said turned a telemedicine order platform into an engine for more than $1 billion in fraudulent Medicare claims has been sentenced to 19 years in prison. The Justice Department announced on October 15, 2026 that Brett Blackman, 43, of Johnson County, Kansas, the owner and CEO of HealthSplash, was sentenced for his role in the scheme built around DMERx. The case is one of the largest telemedicine-enabled durable medical equipment fraud prosecutions on record, and it turns on how fake doctors' orders were manufactured at scale and then laundered through purported telemedicine companies.

What the Justice Department announced

Blackman was convicted after a 23-day jury trial that ended in April 2026 of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud, conspiracy to pay and receive kickbacks, and conspiracy to defraud the United States and to make false statements in connection with health care matters. The court will set restitution and forfeiture at a later date. His co-defendant, Gary Cox, the CEO of DMERx, was sentenced in December 2025 to 15 years in prison.

How the DMERx platform worked

HealthSplash acquired Power Mobility Doctor Rx, LLC, known as DMERx, in September 2017. According to the Justice Department, DMERx was an internet-based platform that generated false and fraudulent doctors' orders for durable medical equipment and prescriptions for other items. Blackman and his co-conspirators used it to connect pharmacies, equipment suppliers and marketers with telemedicine companies that accepted kickbacks and bribes in exchange for signed orders created on the platform, taking a cut of the payments as a referral fee.

The telemedicine companies paid doctors to sign the orders regardless of medical need. Prosecutors said the doctors signed based on a brief phone call with the beneficiary or, in some cases, no interaction at all, and the orders falsely stated that a doctor had examined and treated the patient. Trial evidence included one order claiming in-person tests had been performed even though the doctor never spoke with the person named on it.

How patients were recruited

Marketers targeted Medicare beneficiaries across the country and pressed them to accept medically unnecessary orthotic braces and other items, often through offshore call centers. In one instance described at trial, a foreign call center pushed braces on an undercover agent posing as a beneficiary. The personal and Medicare information collected from beneficiaries was used to populate the fraudulent orders that flowed through DMERx.

The scale of the billing

Orthotic braces were billed to Medicare for more than 346,000 beneficiaries. Medicare was billed for an average of four braces per beneficiary, and for more than 1,200 beneficiaries at least 21 orthotics each were billed. In total, Blackman and his co-conspirators caused Medicare and other federal programs to be billed more than $1 billion, and Medicare and other insurers paid more than $450 million on the claims.

Hiding the telemedicine trail

To keep the operation running, the participants worked to keep it off the radar of Medicare auditors. Prosecutors said the scheme used sham contracts and altered doctors' orders, including by removing references to telemedicine. One co-conspirator described stripping out what the person called "dangerous words" that might trigger a Medicare audit of the equipment suppliers. The concealment is central to why the case is a telemedicine story: the orders depended on telemedicine arrangements, and the fraud worked in part by hiding that dependence.

Who investigated and prosecuted

The case was investigated by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, the FBI, the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General, and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. It was prosecuted by the Health Care Fraud Section of the Justice Department's Fraud Division.

What this means for the telehealth sector

The prosecution reflects a continued federal focus on telemedicine orders generated without a genuine clinical encounter. The core abuse here was not telehealth itself but the sale of signatures: doctors paid through telemedicine companies to authorize equipment they never evaluated. For legitimate telehealth operators, the recurring enforcement markers in these cases are kickbacks tied to order volume, orders signed with little or no patient contact, and documentation that misstates the nature of the visit. The sentence, among the longest in this category, signals that the government is treating platform operators who industrialize those practices as principals rather than peripheral vendors.

Status and limits

This is general information, not legal advice. Blackman was convicted and sentenced; restitution and forfeiture amounts had not been set as of the Justice Department's announcement, and defendants retain the right to appeal. The figures above, including the more than $1 billion billed and the more than $450 million paid, are the government's as stated in its announcements. Readers who want the full record should consult the primary Justice Department releases linked below.