The former CEO of a medical device manufacturer has been sentenced to six years in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release for producing and selling a fake plastic pain management device that was implanted into patients.
Laura Perryman, 55, was found guilty of health care fraud and conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud in a two-week trial in March in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The company she founded in 2010, Stimwave LLC, was purchased by private investors in 2022.
"Laura Perryman callously created a dummy medical device component and told doctors to implant it into patients," U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a June 17 statement on the sentencing. "She did this out of greed, so doctors could bill Medicare and private insurance companies approximately $18,000 for each implantation."
Stimwave did have a medical device, the StimQ PNS System, which involved two different components that worked in tandem to send an electrical current to nerves to help control pain. The receiver component, however, was too long to fit into some patients' bodies for implementation, the U.S. Department of Justice said in the trial. So between 2017 and 2022, Perryman "engaged in a multiyear scheme to design, create, manufacture and market an inert, nonfunctioning component of the device."
This new component, called the stylet, had no wiring or functional components, investigators said. It was just a piece of plastic but was marketed as if it had the same capabilities.