Chutes & Ladders: Done Global principals sentenced on Adderall fraud, Oracle E-Biz Suite hacked, OpenAI’s 5% offer to US government, Meta considers cloud AI, Pearl’s $110M raise

July 9, 2026 | by

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

Short takes: Owlet’s baby sleep survey, MediBioSense’s Infinity Watch, telehealth extensions move to Senate, EBG’s telemental laws app ’26 update, Done Global indicted with principals convicted

January 24, 2026 | by | 1 Comment

Rounding up some current–and back–stories:

The January season for reports continues with Owlet’s newly released ‘Baby Sleep Report’. This surveyed data was generated via Owlet devices (Dream Sock, Dream Duo, and Dream Sight) from 1.2 million babies over 900 million hours of monitoring in 200 different geographic regions during 2025. The survey purpose was to research sleep patterns, trends, and developments affecting babies monitored from one to 18 months. One major finding was that baby night awakenings, that bane of life for nearly all parents, drop by 55% by about 9 months, and sleep patterns stabilize in the first six months. Other findings summarized in the release:

  • 80% of bedtime changes happen in the first six months
  • By 6–8 months, babies on average sleep nearly nine hours at a time
  • Biggest sleep and pulse rate changes happen in the first two months
  • Early high pulse rates are common and usually reflect age-typical patterns
  • Pulse rate remains higher during light sleep than deep sleep

The full report is available here.  

Doncaster, UK’s MediBioSense will be introducing in March the MBS Infinity Watch, which combines an Android-based smartwatch, smartphone, and medical wearable. We covered MBS and the CEO/founder Simon Beniston back in 2018 (!) when your Editor was doing consulting for an app security company partnering with MBS’ on their first product, VitalPatch. MBS products such as the VitalPatch are distributed in the UK, Europe, Saudi Arabia, South America, and Australia. Mr. Beniston’s latest update is on his LinkedIn post. An earlier update from Business Doncaster, a local publication, was published in October. They also achieved medical certification from the Saudi FDA (SFDA) for VitalPatch after a rigorous two-year (and nine month!) process.

The US House voted on Thursday’s (22 Jan) to send a ‘minibus’ bill containing several long-fought for telehealth extension/expansion provisions to the Senate. A ‘minibus’ combines several funding bills (versus a massive ‘omnibus’) in a multi-bill FY26 funding package released by the House Appropriations Committee earlier this week. With legislation related to the Departments of Labor, the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Education, Defense, and Transportation, it contains key provisions preserving telehealth including those not included in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. They are:

  • Extension of Medicare telehealth flexibilities through December 31, 2027.
  • Five-year extension of the Acute Hospital Care at Home Program through September 30, 2030.
  • Extension of in-home cardiopulmonary rehabilitation flexibilities through January 1, 2028.
  • Enhancements to certain durable medical equipment (DME) requirements under Medicare.
  • Requirement that HHS issue guidance within one year on furnishing telehealth services to individuals with limited English proficiency.
  • Inclusion of virtual diabetes suppliers in the Medicare Diabetes Prevention Program through December 31, 2029.

The American Telemedicine Association and ATA Action continue to track and lobby for the extensions. Release 20 Jan, 22 Jan.

Digital health law firm Epstein Becker Green (EBG) announced an update to their free Telemental Health Laws app. The app, available on the Apple App Store and Google Play, is a reference for state-specific laws and policies governing telehealth. This year’s issues include shifting Medicare rules, the gray areas of remote prescribing, and escalating compliance requirements. There’s also the continuing drama of the DEA’s kicking the can down the road, extending pandemic-era prescribing flexibilities to the end of the year versus finalizing a permanent framework for remote prescribing of controlled substances. EBG’s page with link to the app

Last, but not least, are the substantial Federal prison terms that teleprescriber Done Global’s two principals will be facing come 25 February–followed by the indictment of the company. Both founder/CEO Ruthia He and clinical president David Brody were convicted of six counts of illegal distribution of Adderall, a controlled substance, via Done’s telehealth operation, and the submission of false and fraudulent claims for reimbursement for Adderall and other stimulants. The cost? $100 million, as well as “clients’ substance abuse, addiction and, in some cases, overdose”. The fraud included deceptive social media, paying nurse practitioners to refill prescriptions without interaction, and auto-refilling. Both He and Brody were convicted by jury in November. The indictments date back to June 2024 [TTA 24 June, 3 July] and was the first Federal prosecution of criminal drug distribution related to telemedicine prescribing by a digital health company. In December, a Federal grand jury also returned an indictment against Done Global and Mindful Mental Wellness P.A. (MMW), a Florida company, for conspiracy to provide Done members with prescriptions for Adderall and other stimulants that were not issued for a legitimate medical purpose, in return for a subscription fee. Done Global is charged with prescribing over 40 million pills of Adderall and other stimulants, and fraud of $100 million in revenue. Both trials and indictments are in San Francisco, Federal Northern District of California. Department of Justice releases 19 Nov, 17 Dec 2025.

US telehealth controlled substances prescribing waiver may expire at year’s end; DEA may further restrict

September 13, 2024 | by

Current waivers end 31 December without DEA, Congressional action. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) apparently through inaction, will allow the current virtual prescribing flexibilities impacting Schedule II and higher drugs to expire at the end of year. These waivers which removed the in-person examination requirement under the Ryan-Haight Act were instituted during the Covid pandemic and extended twice [TTA 11 Oct 23, 11 May 23] with a final expiration of 31 December 2024.

Reportedly, the DEA is not only wishing to reinstate the status quo ante, but also reportedly wants to institute additional restrictions. However, any draft rule that would reimpose or changes restrictions has not been put out for the public comment period, review, and final rule implementation which typically takes anywhere from 60 to 120 days, well past year’s end. Last year, when a draft rule was released for comment, nearly 40,000 comments were received.

At the time of the 2023 extension that kicked this particular can down the road into the end of a presidential election year, DEA had stated that they would use 2024 to finalize telemedicine prescribing rules, but no action has been taken. Since then, the Department of Justice has filed multiple charges of Medicare and Medicaid fraud and illegal distribution of controlled substances against seven Done Global employees [TTA 3 July and prior], with investigations pending on practices by provider Cerebral and pharmacy Truepill. 

Under the aegis of the American Telemedicine Association (ATA), a coalition of 330+ organizations have again written as of Tuesday 10 September to the current administration and both houses of Congress to 1) extend the waivers for two years, as part of the end of the Federal fiscal year (starting 1 Oct) package, and 2) use the time for DEA to “to fulfill its congressional mandate to establish a special registration pathway that balances access to medically necessary care with appropriate enforcement.” The rationale centers on the lack of time, but strongly around the availability of psychiatrists throughout most of the US–there are none in half of US counties especially in rural areas. (The average MD psychiatrist is well over 50, nearing retirement, and not well reimbursed for his or her time–which is why med school grads in heavy debt don’t gravitate to the specialty.) What is not stated is that many if not most telepsychiatry providers do not have models that will support in-person evaluations as required without waivers.

There are no public actions or responses either by Congress or by the DEA as of today (13 September).

ATA press release, Biden Administration letter, House letter, Senate Leadership letter, Healthcare Dive

ATA Action, ATA’s trade organization and advocacy arm, has also formed a political action committee (PAC), ATA Action PAC. Its stated purpose is to support incumbent Federal candidates including Congressmembers who support their goals in virtual care policy. Candidates on the Federal or state levels will not receive support.  Release

Done Global Federal probe expands to five more people; company suspended from Google, TikTok ad platforms

July 3, 2024 | by

The first telemedicine prescribing Federal prosecution adds charges against five additional employees. The charges are similar to those for Ruthia He, the founder/CEO, and David Brody, listed as the clinical president of Done Global (Done)–providing easy online teleprescription access to Adderall and other Schedule II stimulants, skirting the normal restrictions provided in the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and other regulations [TTA 19 June].

These new charges center on an alleged scheme to defraud federal health care benefit programs including Medicare and Medicaid and are part of the Department of Justice’s 2024 National Health Care Fraud Enforcement Action.

Those charged are Riley Levy, 30, Done’s executive leader, operations and strategy; prescribers Christopher Lucchese, DO, 58; and nurse practitioners Yina Cruz, 37, Katrina Pratcher, 70, and Erin Kim, 54. Levy, Lucchese, Cruz, and Pratcher were charged in the Northern District of California (US Attorney’s office release). Erin Kim was charged in the Middle District of Florida (Case Summary). 

Prescribers were paid based on initial consultations–if they took place–then auto-refills without follow up. Prescribers are also charged with writing prescriptions where Adderall, for instance, was not medically necessary and issued to people who did not have ADHD. Follow up meetings were not compensated and frowned upon.

  • Nurse-practitioner Erin Kim from Florida prescribed over 1.5 million pills since 2021 and earned over $800,000. Done’s system with auto refills even prescribed to patients who had died. As of the end of May, her patient roster was still over 1,100.
  • Nurse-practitioner Yina Cruz from New Jersey made about $20,000 a month prescribing primarily stimulants to 2,300 patients, according to a 2022 interview with The Wall Street Journal. She renewed prescriptions based on forms patients filled out online, sometimes as fast as two renewals a minute. 

Done didn’t respond to a request for comment from the WSJ. A spokesman for the founder, Ruthia He, said she hasn’t entered a plea. The senior doctor, David Brody, has pleaded not guilty. Done maintains a statement on its website of disagreement with the charges and continuance of normal operations.

Done Global knocked off of TikTok and Google ad services–but not Meta. In 2022, Done lost certification by LegitScript, a clearance service for telehealth companies. Advertising continued on Google, Meta, and TikTok into June. Last week, Google and TikTok told the WSJ that Done was suspended. Advertising continues on Meta (Facebook) as long as the ads promote a service, not prescription drugs. The numbers in a suffering online ad market aren’t small, either. Done spent $7 million on Meta ads since November 2022, $20 million on Google, and about $3 million on TikTok ads. based on documents reviewed by the WSJ. Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Standard