Exclusive: UNMC's new chairman of PM&R has a dark, troubled history of Medicare fraud, patient endangerment, and medical board investigations

The September 2016 issue of Strictly Business featuring the new Madonna Rehab Hospital set to open in October 2016

Links and References have been updated!

Last February, we covered a story about the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) creating a new physical medicine & rehabilitation (PM&R) program at the Nebraska Medical Center.

UNMC's newly appointed founding chairman of their newly
created physical medicine & rehabilitation program, Samuel
Bierner, has a dark, shady, and very troubling history with
Medicare fraud, patient safety issues, and investigations
from the Texas Medical Board, according to the public
record, including Dallas' leading daily newspaper

PM&R, or physiatry as it is also known as, is a rather obscure and relatively unknown medical specialty that cares for patients with disabling conditions, including traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, strokes, neurological impairments, and musculoskeletal problems, who are medically stable, but otherwise have some therapeutic, equipment, or other prosthetic needs to take care of themselves after being discharged from the hospital.

In essence, it's a field of medicine that doesn't deal in urgent life or death matters like most other medical specialties, which may explain why it's relatively obscure and unknown to most people in the first place.

In that article, UNMC officials announced they had selected a Dallas-based physiatrist, Dr. Samuel Michael Bierner, as the new founding chairman of UNMC's new PM&R program in Omaha, Nebraska.

Bierner has more than 25 years experience in physiatry and had previously served as the residency director of the PM&R program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas (UTSW) since 2005 and medical director of Parkland Memorial Hospital's PM&R department with what appeared to be a immaculate record; however, we were given an anonymous news tip that there was more than meets the eye to Dr. Bierner's past than he had revealed to UNMC officials when he landed the prestigious job to head their fledgling PM&R program back in February.

Unbeknownst to UNMC officials, the new chairman of their PM&R department was charged in 2012 by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) in a federal court in the Northern District of Texas of conspiring with four other fellow UT Southwestern PM&R faculty members of defrauding federal and state programs with "thousands" of false billings to Medicare and Medicaid that endangered the lives of patients, and later, he made false statements to the medical board saying he was "exonerated of all the charges of fraud" when in fact he wasn't.

U.S.A., ex rel John Doe v. Parkland, Samuel Bierner, Karen Kowalske, Vincent Gabriel, Anne Hudak, and Susan... by Michel Schwalbe