Doctor Who Re-Used Catheters Gets Nearly 8 Years in Prison

A doctor has been sentenced to nearly 8 years in prison for performing unnecessary vein procedures and re-using single-use catheters on patients, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

In 2019, a federal jury found Donald Woo Lee, MD, of Temecula, California, guilty in a $12 million scheme to perform medically unnecessary procedures on Medicare beneficiaries and upcode those claims.

The jury also found him guilty of re-packaging single-use catheters for re-use on patients, putting them at risk of infection and other injuries, according to DOJ.

Evidence presented during a 5-day trial in 2019 revealed that from 2012 to 2015, Lee recruited Medicare beneficiaries to his clinics and falsely diagnosed them with venous insufficiency. He provided those patients with vein ablation procedures that weren’t needed, then billed those procedures to Medicare using an inappropriate code to get higher reimbursements, which is also known as upcoding.

Lee ultimately received $4.5 million from the federal insurer, from the $12 million he billed.

He was arrested in 2016, and his sentencing was set for March 2020, but it was delayed more than a dozen times since then, according to the Mercury News. He had also pleaded guilty to one count of submitting false declarations in a bankruptcy proceeding, according to DOJ.

In addition to his imprisonment, Lee was sentenced to serve 3 years of supervised release and ordered to pay more than $4.5 million in restitution to Medicare.

Lee surrendered his medical license in October 2019, according to documents from the Medical Board of California. He had previously been placed on probation for alleged negligence in the care of at least two patients, and for pre-signing prescriptions for medical assistants to order medications for patients in his absence, among other accusations.

He obtained his medical degree from St. George’s University in Grenada in 1994, and then completed an internal medicine residency at the University of California Los Angeles in 1997, according to board records.

Lee made headlines in January after Orange County realtor Terri Litzkow filed a lawsuit alleging that he performed procedures on her from 2017 to 2021, even though he’d lost his license in 2019.

The lawsuit charges that Lee had been hired by Jennifer Armstrong, MD, star of Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” and that he’d performed facial thread lift treatments on the realtor even though he was unlicensed.

Lee denied working for Armstrong to a Mercury News reporter, but said he had trained her in cosmetic thread lift procedures in 2019 and early 2020.