One big years-long chute for Done Global’s Ruthia He and David Brody. The convicted former founder/CEO and clinical president were sentenced to substantial Federal prison terms this past Tuesday. Ms. He will be facing six years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and a fine of $1 million. Dr. Brody was sentenced to two years imprisonment, three years of supervised release, and a fine of $1 million. In addition, there will be restitution to fraud victims.
To be announced at a later date: when sentences will start and where they will be served, based on recommendations from the Bureau of Prisons.
While Done Global is effectively ‘done’, the company also does business under the name Mindful Health.
The points of the (at least) $100 million fraud were based on the illegal telehealth prescription of Adderall and other Schedule II stimulants such as Vyvance. Medications on Schedule II have accepted medical uses but carry high potential for abuse and psychological or physical dependence and thus are controlled:
- A scheme that used the Done Global technology platform, compensation structure, and clinical protocols to unlawfully distribute over 37 million pills of Adderall, defraud insurers of over $12 million, and obstruct the federal investigation that followed.
- The defendant (He) spent over $40 million on social media advertisements to deceive Americans into believing they had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), falsely diagnosing patients with ADHD, and distributing Adderall, including to patients who the company was warned were suffering from Adderall psychosis, bipolar, depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions that were worsened by stimulant prescriptions.
- These were designed to boost the Done Global valuation to above $1 billion.
From the detailed Department of Justice press release: “The defendants refused to hire or fired Done clinicians who did not participate in the conspiracy, while paying up to $60,000 per month to clinicians who signed Adderall prescriptions every 30 seconds. The defendants also used an “auto-refill” platform technology feature after an initial diagnosis to minimize follow-up appointments, where prescribers signed prescriptions for Adderall based on an automatically generated message that a patient desired a refill. Because of these policies, some patients went years without seeing clinicians, who continually authorized refills even through involuntary psychiatric holds or after the patients had died.”
Dr. Brody alone personally wrote prescriptions for 394,324 Schedule II stimulant pills prescribed to 6,559 Done members. He never evaluated them nor reviewed a single patient record. Part of the case was Done’s record of misdiagnosis, over-prescribing, and patient death.
Additional charges against Ms. He included diversion of company assets and operations abroad. As indictments neared in 2023/2024, they both deleted records, instructed employees to delete incriminatory documents and messages from the company servers, and transferred communications to platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal using disappearing message settings to conceal sensitive information.
After completion of her sentence, it is likely that Ms. He will be deported to her home country of China. She attempted to flee to Hong Kong in February 2023 and was forced to surrender her passport. Despite this, she made a second attempt after obtaining Chinese travel documents, then was arrested and detained before trial as a flight risk. Two other factors were that she transferred $4.6 million in ad-related revenue to China and set up a shell company there.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), HHS-Office of Inspector General, IRS Criminal Investigations, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS) investigated as violations included financial diversion, record falsification, drug prescribing and Medicare/Medicaid fraud. The main DOJ units involved were the National Fraud Enforcement Division and the Health Care Fraud Unit.
The case was heard in the Federal Northern District of California by Judge Charles Breyer. Dr. Brody plans to appeal and significantly apologized for his actions. KQED and Behavioral Health Business.
Background on the indictment and conviction, TTA 24 January and prior as noted in the article. There is no additional information to date on the grand jury charges from December 2025 of the Done and Mindful companies.
Editor’s POV: Done wasn’t the first–the far larger Cerebral was in 2022. While it is still in business, Cerebral has spent much of its time and fisc in litigation and settlements. Neither will be the last. DOJ and Federal agencies are cracking down hard on waste, fraud, and abuse in healthcare; major targets of DOJ/HHS/DEA scrutiny are telementalhealth and substance use disorder (SUD) management, including prescribing and payments. More to come.
Another chute for Oracle, leading to the Hacking trap door. The vulnerability is within Oracle’s E-Business Suite (EBS) and affects the file transmission component of Oracle Payments payments. The flaw has been tracked as CVE-2026-46817 and carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. 900 systems may be exposed, though Oracle flagged it in their May patch updates. The US National Vulnerability Database states that the vulnerability can be exploited remotely over HTTP without authentication. Oracle software seems to be a favorite target of hackers. Cybersec organizations Defused and Shadowserver, along with the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have flagged multiple software vulnerabilities across Oracle’s EBS, WebLogic Server, and PeopleSoft. Computing UK
Is it a Chute or Ladder? Or Run For Your Life? OpenAI and Sam Altman made headlines before the July 4 celebrations with an offer of a 5% share of the company to the US Federal Government. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are imminent IPOs. The Financial Times report is based upon “early conversations” cited from two insiders. A 5% share, based on current valuations, is about $42.6 billion. It is not only a nice chunk of change in the public fisc but also a clever PR move that may help neutralize public blowback and downright hostility towards unwanted technology; sprawling, noisy, spewing, heat pooling and energy-greedy data centers; AI job displacement; companies discovering that AI is draining them dry without ROI; environmental and community groups; unions, local governments, and more. How it will mollify people who are angry about any of the previous is doubtful. Nor will it please those aligned with socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, who is demanding close to half of OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s value to be held in a sovereign wealth fund.
Whether Anthropic and the hyperscalers building like mad such as Oracle, Meta, Microsoft and others would follow Altman’s lead is debatable. The Computing UK take on this is that it is a cynical and obvious bribe, perhaps one worthy of a Marie Antoinette (who may never have said ‘let them eat cake’…but nevermind). The accountant or computing side of this Editor’s brain flags that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are remotely profitable. Oracle as a hyperscaler has already fallen into a debt canyon from where it may not emerge. Likely, Oracle is not the only one either, if you isolate AI from hyperscalers’ other sustaining businesses.
A generous offer or a Trojan Horse? You pick….
In this Editor’s view, it satisfies no one, solves no real problems, puts power in exactly the wrong hands, and creates a major conflict of interest in the objective and responsible development of AI.
In the Ladder department, Meta is talking up selling its excess AI cloud computing capacity, thus creating a new revenue stream. If this Editor is not mistaken, it’s similar to the Amazon Web Services model. A second stream would be renting out its AI application programming interface (API) to developers. The charge will be based on usage. That assumes that Meta is envisioning a time that they will have that excess capacity to sell. Right now, there is a dearth of actual, online data centers and a shortage of capacity [TTA 14 May]. Computing UK
A $110 million split raise for Pearl Health rounds it out. The Medicare value-based care management services organization (MSO) and population health services for providers gained a $50 million Series C equity investment from Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Viking Global Investors, AlleyCorp, and Ulysses Capital, plus a $60 million debt facility led by Trinity Capital. The new funds will be used for developing their AI platform, turning clinical intelligence into measurable outcomes, growing health system and payer partnerships, expansion into Medicare Advantage, and new risk offerings. Pearl’s funding to date is $205 million since 2020. It claims that it reached profitability last year and will triple its patient base from 2024 to the end of this year. It currently serves 10,000 providers across 40 states, with more than 250,000 Medicare beneficiaries, in CMS ACO models such as the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) and ACO REACH ending this year. The shrinking list of competitors in this space include Aledade and Astrana Health (which bought one of the pioneers, Collaborative Health Systems). Release, MedCityNews
Leave a Reply