OSAKA -- The director of the Yasuda Hospital group ordered his staff to forge medical reports and administrate medicine without actually seeing patients, hospital sources alleged July 18.
Police and prosecutors July 17 raided the group's three hospitals in Osaka Prefecture. The facilities are also suspected of acquiring 2 billion yen in public money by filing fraudulent claims. Mototaka Yasuda, 77, director and effective owner of the group, created the operations manual that tells medical staff to administer oxygen and intravenous feeding without first checking a patient's symptoms when they are admitted, the sources said. The manual also instructs them to prescribe tranquilizers and cardiotonic drugs relative to the patient's weight, the sources said.
Yasuda also ordered the group's three hospitals to collect data each month on patients' weights, blood pressure and other figures. He would then return a memo outlining prescription schedules for these patients for the following month.
Hospital staffers filled out medical claims based on Yasuda's memo and nurses would then forge patients' medical records to match the contents of the memo, the sources alleged. The three hospitals are also suspected of fraudulently acquiring the public funds over a period of 2 1/2 years by reporting an inflated number of employees, investigative sources said.
Yasuda Hospital claimed in October 1994 to have 108 nurses and that the ratio of inpatients to nurses was 4 to 1. It accordingly received 4,240 yen per patient in medical fees from local authorities, prefectural officials said. But the real number of employees is suspected to have been 49, meaning the hospital should have been eligible for only 1,420 yen per patient, they said.