Jury convicts Natick psychiatrist of billing Medicare, insurers for nearly $11 million worth of brain treatments he never provided

A federal jury in Boston today convicted Dr. Gustavo Kinrys on 14 of 15 charges he faced for submitting bogus bills for depression treatments patients never got - and for hours he allegedly spent with patients but didn't.

After his arrest in 2020, prosecutors said that on one day in 2017, Kinrys submitted bills for one-hour sessions with 79 different patients over a 24-hour period. The government said he also billed Medicare and private insurers for more than 1,000 sessions with 200 patients at times when he was actually out of the country. His indictment covered the period of 2015 to 2018.

US District Court Judge Denise Casper scheduled sentencing for Jan. 31 for Kinrys, whose practice was in an office on MetroWest Medical Center's Leonard Morse campus, but who lives in Wellesley.

At the heart of the charges for wire fraud, making false statements relating to health-care matters, falsification of documents and obstructing an investigation were sessions of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and psychotherapy for patients suffering from depression. TMS is a non-invasive procedure in which a magnet device placed on the patient's scalp can generate electrical currents in a patient's cerebral cortex, which can help some patients who have serious depression.

Among the patients for whom Kinrys billed insurers was his wife - whom he claimed he had given 460 separate TMS sessions when, in fact, she never underwent the procedure with him, according to the 2020 indictment against him. In total, the feds says he billed insurers for 8,484 separate sessions with 75 patients, all of the the sessions fake - in addition to thousands more bogus sessions with patients who did get some of the treatments.

The indictment also charged that when Kinrys realized Medicare investigators were looking into his bills, he created bogus documentation for the alleged sessions.

The jury convicted Kinrys on all charges except for one count of destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations between July 31 and Aug. 2, 2018. Jurors, however, then convicted him on the next count, of obstructing a federal investigation between July 12 and Oct. 15, 2018.

Complete indictment (4.6M PDF).