Psychiatrist Gustavo Kinrys, a Massachusetts General Hospital staff doctor and a Harvard Medical School educator, was sentenced to eight years in prison this June after being convicted last year of billing insurance for $19 million of services he never delivered.

     Kinrys billed Medicare and private insurers for millions of dollars worth of in-person psychotherapy sessions that never occurred. He was on vacation in the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas and the Czech Republic on those days he had billed for. His nine hundred fraudulent sessions included 382 claims of delivering more than twenty-four hours
of sessions in a single day, and on one day in particular in June, 2017, he claimed to have delivered an hour long session to each of seventy different patients.

     He also billed Medicare and private insurers for $10.6 million for thousands of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMA) sessions he never delivered, including claims for 8,000 TCM sessions to seventy patients who never underwent even the first treatment.

     TCM is a controversial therapy using electromagnetic stimulation of the brain cells in an attempt to treat depression. It is called a “non-invasive” therapy. An electromagnetic coil delivers its pulses directly into the patient’s brain, but it is not as “invasive” as ECT, the electroconvulsive therapy that delivers up to 400 volts of electricity into a patient as “therapy” to trigger a grand mal seizure.

     Besides his positions at Mass General Hospital and Harvard, Kinrys owned and operated Advanced TMS Associates and delivered TMS therapy and psychotherapy there to patients suffering from depression. A single session of TMS costs between $300 and $500 and a “normal” course of treatment consists of 20 to 30 sessions.

     The investigation of Kinrys revealed that he and an employee had created false patients records for both Medicare and private insurers, and that he had created even more fraudulent patient records in response to a 2018 subpoena from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General.

     In addition to convicting him of $19 million of insurance fraud, a jury also found him guilty of six counts of false statements about health care matters in general, seven counts of wire fraud, and one count of obstruction of justice.

     When the jury announced in the courtroom their conviction of him on those charges, he threatened and maligned his own attorney and then announced that one day his prosecutors would receive a “reckoning.” “Karma is a bitch,” he said.

     He should know.

     The month before his court case, October, 2023, Kimrys had actually filed lawsuits against the insurers that he had defrauded and claimed that they still owed him money, despite the fact that he had signed a Voluntary Agreement Not to Practice in December, 2020, with the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine. It is not clear if he did report the surrender of his license, as he was legally obligated to after forfeiting it, to his employers at Massachusetts General and Harvard or to his own TMS clinic.