Millennium Health, a health solutions company, has appointed Darrell Contreras as its new chief compliance officer.

Contreras brings nearly 20 years of experience in compliance in the health care industry and will be responsible for leading all areas of the company's compliance programs. He will oversee corporate compliance, ethics, and HIPAA privacy standards for Millennium.

Prior to joining Millennium, Contreras founded and was a partner of JD HealthCare Partners, a compliance and risk management consulting firm, where he worked with health care organizations on legal, privacy, risk and compliance matters. He began his career as a consultant for Ernst & Young's Health Sciences Advisory Services practice and later served as the chief compliance officer for two large health care organizations.

The announcement of Contreras' appointment comes just weeks after Millenium Health reached a $256 million settlement with the government to resolve allegations that it billed for Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health care programs for medically unnecessary urine drug and genetic testing and for providing free items to physicians who agreed to refer expensive laboratory testing business to Millennium.

As part of the settlements, Millennium has agreed to pay $227 million to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act (FCA) by systematically billing federal health care programs for excessive and unnecessary urine drug testing from Jan. 1, 2008, through May 20, 2015. Millennium also has agreed to pay $10 million to resolve FCA allegations that it submitted false claims to federal health care programs from Jan. 1, 2012, through May 20, 2015, for genetic testing that was performed routinely and without an individualized assessment of need. 

In addition, Millennium will pay $19.2 million to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to resolve certain administrative actions related to Millennium’s urine drug test billing practices. In connection with the FCA settlements, Millennium has also entered into a corporate integrity agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services-Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG), which is currently monitoring Millenium's compliance efforts.

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