HealthSplash CEO Convicted in $1B Medicare Fraud Built on Fake Doctor Orders
A federal jury in South Florida just convicted Brett Blackman, 42, whose healthcare software platform quietly industrialized the production of fraudulent doctors' orders — billing Medicare over $1 billion for braces, creams, and equipment that sick seniors never needed and often never asked for.
Brett Blackman ran a healthcare software company. He also ran one of the largest Medicare fraud operations in the history of the state of Florida. On May 13, 2026, a federal jury in the Southern District of Florida delivered its verdict: guilty on every count.
Blackman, 42, of Johnson County, Kansas, was the founder and CEO of HealthSplash Inc. In September 2017, HealthSplash acquired Power Mobility Doctor Rx, LLC — known in court documents as DMERx. On paper, DMERx was an internet-based platform connecting telemedicine providers with durable medical equipment suppliers. In practice, it was an automated prescription-forging engine.
Here is how the machine worked: Overseas call centers and mass-mailed advertisements targeted Medicare beneficiaries — the elderly, the sick, people who trusted that a call about their health benefits was legitimate. According to evidence presented at trial, beneficiaries were pressured to accept orthotic braces, pain creams, and other items they had never requested and did not need. Once a beneficiary agreed, DMERx generated a doctor's order. The fraudulent orders falsely represented that a physician had examined and treated the Medicare beneficiaries — when in fact the doctors were simply paid to sign orders without any meaningful interaction with patients, and in some cases, no interaction at all.
An undercover federal agent who posed as a Medicare patient laid out the anatomy of the scam in court. The agent was routed first to a foreign call center that pushed them to accept multiple braces. The call center then handed off to the DMERx platform. A doctor signed off on multiple brace orders. The same doctor, according to the DOJ, claimed to have conducted tests that can only be performed in person — tests that never occurred because the doctor never spoke with the agent.
That is not a billing error. That is a factory.
Blackman and his co-conspirators connected pharmacies, DME suppliers, and marketers with telemedicine companies that accepted illegal kickbacks and bribes in exchange for the signed orders. Blackman and his network then took referral fees at every junction in the chain. The total volume pushed through this system: more than $1 billion in false claims billed to Medicare and other federal healthcare benefit programs. Medicare and other federal programs paid out more than $450 million before investigators caught up.
The scheme operated across South Florida — including Miami-Dade County — as well as Kansas and Arizona, from at least 2015 through 2020. That is five years of continuous industrial-scale theft from a public program designed to keep elderly and disabled Americans alive.
The jury convicted Blackman on three counts: conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and wire fraud, conspiracy to pay and receive healthcare kickbacks, and conspiracy to defraud the United States and make false statements in connection with healthcare matters. He faces a maximum of 20 years on the fraud and wire fraud conviction, five additional years on the kickbacks count, and five more years on the conspiracy to defraud count. Sentencing is scheduled for August 26, 2026, in federal court.
This was not Blackman's first rodeo through the justice system — it was just the first time a jury got to weigh in. Blackman and his co-defendants were originally indicted in 2023 under the Biden administration. His co-defendant Gary Cox, who served as CEO of DMERx, was convicted in a prior trial and has already been sentenced to 15 years in federal prison.
The investigation was a multi-agency effort. The FBI, the HHS Office of Inspector General, the Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General, and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service all participated — a detail worth underscoring. This fraud reached into TRICARE and VA benefit programs, not just Medicare. When a DME fraud ring branches into military healthcare, it is no longer just a Medicare problem. It is a federal benefits problem.
The Blackman conviction lands inside a dramatically escalating enforcement environment. The DOJ's June 2025 National Health Care Fraud Takedown was its largest ever, charging 324 defendants connected to more than $14.6 billion in alleged fraud. In April 2026, the DOJ announced a new West Coast Health Care Fraud Strike Force covering Arizona, Nevada, and Northern California. The agency also stood up a Health Care Fraud Data Fusion Center that now fuses billing pattern data from CMS, DOJ, and HHS-OIG into real-time outlier detection. The era of waiting for a whistleblower is over — the government is now mining the data and finding the fraudsters before a complaint is ever filed.
The data trail in the Blackman case was not subtle. The scheme ran from at least 2015 to 2020. Hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries were contacted. A platform designed to manufacture fake prescriptions at scale operated openly inside a registered corporate structure. The shell — HealthSplash, Inc. — held the asset that made the fraud possible. The acquisition of DMERx in 2017 was the moment the operation went industrial.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called it "one of the most egregious fraud schemes in Florida history." Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald of the newly created National Fraud Enforcement Division described Blackman as having "orchestrated a massive telemarketing scheme" using foreign call centers and spam mailers to target seniors.
Blackman, for his part, apparently spent some of those fraud proceeds on a waterfront mansion he showed off in a self-produced music video. The Justice Department released a photo of him wearing a gold chain necklace featuring a large dollar sign. It would be comic if the money had not come from people on fixed incomes who thought they were getting medical help.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services estimated it prevented $11.9 billion in potentially fraudulent Medicare payments between fiscal years 2022 and 2024 alone, according to an April 2026 Government Accountability Office report. The implication of that number is uncomfortable: the fraud that slipped through was substantial. Blackman's $450 million in actual Medicare payouts is a data point inside a much larger hemorrhage.
I spent nine years tracking benefits fraud, and the HealthSplash case is a textbook example of what I call the platform pivot — the moment a fraudster stops working individual scams and builds infrastructure to automate theft at scale. DMERx was not just a tool; it was a fraud franchise. Buy the software company, plug in the call centers, wire up the corrupt telemedicine doctors, and let the fake prescriptions print themselves. The $1 billion headline number is striking, but what should alarm every investigator and policymaker is the architecture: a registered corporation, a legitimate-looking acquisition, sham contracts for cover, and overseas call centers insulating the operation from direct scrutiny. This is not a guy running scripts in a back office. This is organized financial crime wearing a startup hoodie. If Blackman walks out of sentencing in August with anything less than the 15 years his co-conspirator Gary Cox received, the message to the next platform builder is clear: the upside is enormous and the downside is manageable. The winners if nothing changes are the next generation of DMERx operators, already watching the sentencing math.
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