A PREMIUM TIMES investigation revealed how medical diagnostic companies are colluding with doctors and hospitals to scam Nigerians through a referral kickbacks scheme

ONE afternoon in July 2013 while descending the stairs of a Lagos hospital where she worked as an auxiliary nurse, Abosede Oriabure, 45, heard a snap in her left knee. She felt a sharp pain.

The pain persisted for a few minutes but later subsided. Although the pain did not completely disappear, it was nothing serious beyond a mild ache and she did not think much about it.

But days later, the pain returned with a vengeance. Her knee was practically burning from the inside. She could barely lift her left leg. To ease the unrelenting pain, Mrs Oriabure resorted to self-medication. She used Tramadol, a recently banned painkiller, oxycodone and other similarly addictive analgesics.

But the pain never went away. In fact, it got worse.

As the pain became increasingly excruciating, she visited an orthopaedic doctor, who recommended she did an MRI scan to determine why the pain had persisted. The cost of the MRI Scan was N85,000.00. Unemployed and barely scraping a living, the mother of three could not raise the money. She resigned to taking the addictive painkillers to get by one day at a time. When she thought things could not get worse, one Sunday in August 2018 she woke up and discovered that her left knee had twisted into an arc giving her a K-shaped stance when she managed to stand upright.

After months of enduring excruciating pains, she managed to do the MRI scan in September 2019 after her husband took a loan from a consumer credit finance firm. Although she has been told she may be needing a knee replacement surgery, her doctor told her that the pressure on the knee during the six years she waited before seeking professional help may have caused irreparable damage to the knee.

“My condition would have been better if I had done the MRI scan in 2013 or soon after and started treatment then. But I couldn’t raise N85,000 then,” she said.

Mrs Oriabure’s story is not an isolated case. Without universal health coverage, the majority of Nigerians are unable to pay for their health bills, including the cost of essential medical diagnosis, resulting in a spike in medical complications and deaths.

A 2019 survey by, one of the country’s top polling organisations, NOI Polls, revealed that at least 89 per cent pay for healthcare services out-of-pocket.

But while millions of Nigerians are increasingly struggling to pay for life-saving healthcare bills, including payment for vital medical diagnosis, doctors, hospitals, and medical diagnostic services providers are defrauding them of billions of naira yearly through a fraudulent medical referral kickback scam, a PREMIUM TIMES investigation spanning 20 months has revealed.

This criminal, multi-billion naira fee-splitting scheme, cut, or rebate, as it is commonly known in the healthcare sector, is done in such a way that medical laboratories hike the cost of medical tests, by at least 20 per cent, and as high as 35 per cent, which is later paid to the referring doctors or hospitals.

In addition to hiking the cost of medical test, some medical laboratory providers also actively encourage doctors and hospitals to upsell unsuspecting customers for medical diagnosis they recommend. Insiders in the health sectors also told PREMIUM TIMES that some doctors prescribe tests patients do not need just so they can earn kickbacks from laboratories.

Our investigation uncovered the rotten underbelly of a sector where the rules are made by the profiteering owners of diagnostics centres, and physicians, who without remorse, steal from their patients in blatant violation of the Hippocratic Oaths they swore to uphold, the Code of Medical Ethics of the Medical Dental Council of Nigerian, and the Rules of Professional Conduct for Medical Laboratory Scientists, laboratory technicians and laboratory assistants.

How patients are defrauded

Posing as a physician, this reporter, for over 20 months painstakingly sent people to do several medical tests in at least nine of the country’s biggest medical laboratories using referral forms obtained from sales representatives of the diagnostic laboratories.

While all the diagnostic laboratories agreed to pay this reporter a 10 per cent to 20 per cent cut of the fee they charged for diagnosis or encouraged the reporter to upsell the fee for medical tests to patients, only six of them actually credited this reporter’s bank accounts with the agreed kickback.

PREMIUM TIMES covered the costs of the tests as well as funded the patients’ transportation to the laboratories.

The scheme is such that diagnostic centres first register doctors and hospitals with their bank account details and the kickbacks due to doctors for referring patients to them are usually calculated at the end of each month and transferred to doctors’ bank accounts.

Two of the diagnostic centres even made this reporter sign “memorandum of understanding” to pay him a kickback which is described with deodorised terms like “B2B prices”, “mutually beneficial partnership”, “hourly rate” and “physician fee”.

In all but one instance, the diagnostic centres did not care to check if this reporter was indeed a physician as he claimed, neither did they authenticate the name of the fictitious clinic he gave them nor insisted on visiting him at the clinic he claimed he worked for before handling him their referral booklets.

In fact, all the diagnostic referral forms used to refer people for tests were handed to this reporter at malls, restaurants, and other public places. One diagnostic centre even had its dispatch rider deliver it at an address that isn’t a hospital.

Me Cure Healthcare’s HelloDoc Referrals App

Indian-owned Me Cure Healthcare headquartered at Oshodi, Lagos, is one of the biggest medical laboratories in the country. The company has six branches across the country including an Eye Centre. It is also planning to set up what it describes as West Africa’s biggest oncology centre that will provide services such as cancer diagnostics, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

Me Cure Healthcare’s parent company – Me Cure Industries Limited –is also into production and marketing of generic drugs, dietary supplements, healthcare-focused IT and e-commerce for healthcare.

The private limited liability company was registered in Nigeria in 2005 by the Samir Udani family.

PREMIUM TIMES investigation reveals that Me Cure operates a sophisticated fee-splitting scheme using a sleek mobile app called HelloDocApp. The app is described as “the biggest online community of doctors in Nigeria.”

To be part of Me Cure’s kickback scheme, doctors are first recommended by the company’s sale representative before they are granted access to use the app by another representative of the company based in India.

READ MORE: https://www.icirnigeria.org/investigation-kickbacks-for-referrals-how-nigerian-doctors-hospitals-diagnostic-centres-are-defrauding-patients/

Chai

Thief thief people

The cesspool of corruption in the nigerian

healthcare sector is yet to be unraveled.

I don't want to give myself heartache, discussing about it.

Shehuyinka:
A PREMIUM TIMES investigation revealed how medical diagnostic companies are colluding with doctors and hospitals to scam Nigerians through a referral kickbacks scheme

ONE afternoon in July 2013 while descending the stairs of a Lagos hospital where she worked as an auxiliary nurse, Abosede Oriabure, 45, heard a snap in her left knee. She felt a sharp pain.

The pain persisted for a few minutes but later subsided. Although the pain did not completely disappear, it was nothing serious beyond a mild ache and she did not think much about it.

But days later, the pain returned with a vengeance. Her knee was practically burning from the inside. She could barely lift her left leg. To ease the unrelenting pain, Mrs Oriabure resorted to self-medication. She used Tramadol, a recently banned painkiller, oxycodone and other similarly addictive analgesics.

But the pain never went away. In fact, it got worse.

As the pain became increasingly excruciating, she visited an orthopaedic doctor, who recommended she did an MRI scan to determine why the pain had persisted. The cost of the MRI Scan was N85,000.00. Unemployed and barely scraping a living, the mother of three could not raise the money. She resigned to taking the addictive painkillers to get by one day at a time. When she thought things could not get worse, one Sunday in August 2018 she woke up and discovered that her left knee had twisted into an arc giving her a K-shaped stance when she managed to stand upright.

After months of enduring excruciating pains, she managed to do the MRI scan in September 2019 after her husband took a loan from a consumer credit finance firm. Although she has been told she may be needing a knee replacement surgery, her doctor told her that the pressure on the knee during the six years she waited before seeking professional help may have caused irreparable damage to the knee.

“My condition would have been better if I had done the MRI scan in 2013 or soon after and started treatment then. But I couldn’t raise N85,000 then,” she said.

Mrs Oriabure’s story is not an isolated case. Without universal health coverage, the majority of Nigerians are unable to pay for their health bills, including the cost of essential medical diagnosis, resulting in a spike in medical complications and deaths.

A 2019 survey by, one of the country’s top polling organisations, NOI Polls, revealed that at least 89 per cent pay for healthcare services out-of-pocket.

But while millions of Nigerians are increasingly struggling to pay for life-saving healthcare bills, including payment for vital medical diagnosis, doctors, hospitals, and medical diagnostic services providers are defrauding them of billions of naira yearly through a fraudulent medical referral kickback scam, a PREMIUM TIMES investigation spanning 20 months has revealed.

This criminal, multi-billion naira fee-splitting scheme, cut, or rebate, as it is commonly known in the healthcare sector, is done in such a way that medical laboratories hike the cost of medical tests, by at least 20 per cent, and as high as 35 per cent, which is later paid to the referring doctors or hospitals.

In addition to hiking the cost of medical test, some medical laboratory providers also actively encourage doctors and hospitals to upsell unsuspecting customers for medical diagnosis they recommend. Insiders in the health sectors also told PREMIUM TIMES that some doctors prescribe tests patients do not need just so they can earn kickbacks from laboratories.

Our investigation uncovered the rotten underbelly of a sector where the rules are made by the profiteering owners of diagnostics centres, and physicians, who without remorse, steal from their patients in blatant violation of the Hippocratic Oaths they swore to uphold, the Code of Medical Ethics of the Medical Dental Council of Nigerian, and the Rules of Professional Conduct for Medical Laboratory Scientists, laboratory technicians and laboratory assistants.

How patients are defrauded

Posing as a physician, this reporter, for over 20 months painstakingly sent people to do several medical tests in at least nine of the country’s biggest medical laboratories using referral forms obtained from sales representatives of the diagnostic laboratories.

While all the diagnostic laboratories agreed to pay this reporter a 10 per cent to 20 per cent cut of the fee they charged for diagnosis or encouraged the reporter to upsell the fee for medical tests to patients, only six of them actually credited this reporter’s bank accounts with the agreed kickback.

PREMIUM TIMES covered the costs of the tests as well as funded the patients’ transportation to the laboratories.

The scheme is such that diagnostic centres first register doctors and hospitals with their bank account details and the kickbacks due to doctors for referring patients to them are usually calculated at the end of each month and transferred to doctors’ bank accounts.

Two of the diagnostic centres even made this reporter sign “memorandum of understanding” to pay him a kickback which is described with deodorised terms like “B2B prices”, “mutually beneficial partnership”, “hourly rate” and “physician fee”.

In all but one instance, the diagnostic centres did not care to check if this reporter was indeed a physician as he claimed, neither did they authenticate the name of the fictitious clinic he gave them nor insisted on visiting him at the clinic he claimed he worked for before handling him their referral booklets.

In fact, all the diagnostic referral forms used to refer people for tests were handed to this reporter at malls, restaurants, and other public places. One diagnostic centre even had its dispatch rider deliver it at an address that isn’t a hospital.

Me Cure Healthcare’s HelloDoc Referrals App

Indian-owned Me Cure Healthcare headquartered at Oshodi, Lagos, is one of the biggest medical laboratories in the country. The company has six branches across the country including an Eye Centre. It is also planning to set up what it describes as West Africa’s biggest oncology centre that will provide services such as cancer diagnostics, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

Me Cure Healthcare’s parent company – Me Cure Industries Limited –is also into production and marketing of generic drugs, dietary supplements, healthcare-focused IT and e-commerce for healthcare.

The private limited liability company was registered in Nigeria in 2005 by the Samir Udani family.

PREMIUM TIMES investigation reveals that Me Cure operates a sophisticated fee-splitting scheme using a sleek mobile app called HelloDocApp. The app is described as “the biggest online community of doctors in Nigeria.”

To be part of Me Cure’s kickback scheme, doctors are first recommended by the company’s sale representative before they are granted access to use the app by another representative of the company based in India.

READ MORE: https://www.icirnigeria.org/investigation-kickbacks-for-referrals-how-nigerian-doctors-hospitals-diagnostic-centres-are-defrauding-patients/

Wow....what an expose. I don't know if this "practice" is obtained in developed nations too but but this clearly shows you that over here, most of this medical doctors, labs, clinics, etc are all about the profit making first before service to humanity...