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 | No Comments

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

Done CEO, president arrested, charged with $100M fraud on Adderall distribution in first Federal case on telemedicine prescribing (updated)

June 19, 2024 | by | 1 Comment

Done effectively done at the C-level, but not done in business yet. Last Thursday, Ruthia He, the founder/CEO, and David Brody, listed as the clinical president of Done Global (Done), were arrested in California on a Federal indictment filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. They are charged with providing easy online teleprescription access to Adderall and other Schedule II stimulants through patients paying a monthly subscription fee and skirted the normal restrictions provided in the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and other regulations. By providing easy access and raising subscription fees, He and Brody are charged with generating over $100 million in revenue by arranging for the prescription of over 40 million pills from 2020 into 2023, during the pandemic when the Ryan Haight requirements were temporarily suspended by the DEA. 

Given the multiple counts of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and distribution of controlled substances, the charges may earn them a maximum 20 years in Federal prison. One would also expect a clawback of payments made by subscribers, health plans, and Federal programs. The latter two, according to the DOJ release, amount to $14 million alone.

The Done indictment is the first Federal prosecution of criminal drug distribution related to telemedicine prescribing by a digital health company. In the 2020-2023 period, Done was a seed stage company, cited in the indictment as misrepresenting its size. Its current backers are Craft Ventures, F7 Ventures, and Offline Ventures but no additional rounds are listed on Crunchbase or other sources. He was a former product designer at Facebook and she was involved as an investor in or founder of various startups before Done according to her LinkedIn profile. David Brody, MD, is a psychiatrist listed as the chief medical officer of Connectix Health and as a self-employed consultant in Collaboration Care, with no reference to a position at Done. 

According to the Department of Justice release, He and Brody:

  • Targeted drug-seeking users through social media buys in the tens of millions of dollars.
  • Intentionally structured the Done platform to facilitate access to Adderall and other stimulants. This is evident from their current website which emphasizes ADHD. 
  • Instructed Done prescribers to prescribe Adderall and other stimulants even if the Done member did not qualify or they were not medically necessary. They also mandated that initial encounters would be under 30 minutes. 
  • He put into place a monthly auto-refill function for subscribers without further check-ins.
  • Discouraged Done prescribers from follow-up care. The compensation structure for prescribers solely paid on the number of patients receiving prescriptions–not for medical visits, telemedicine consults, or time spent after the initial consult.  
  • Conspired to defraud pharmacies, Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurers by dispensing Adderall and other stimulants to Done members, who also continued to pay subscription fees.

Further, “He and Brody allegedly persisted in the conspiracy even after being made aware that material was posted on online social networks about how to use Done to obtain easy access to Adderall and other stimulants, and that Done members had overdosed and died.” 

Done was singled out in June of 2022 when Cerebral was facing Federal investigation and a grand jury subpoena, actions that continue today but haven’t proceeded to an indictment. At that time, Truepill (also under DEA scrutiny on Schedule II, TTA 22 Dec 2022), CVS, and Walmart Health refused to fill prescriptions by both Cerebral and Done. With Cerebral facing investigation, Done wasn’t far behind. By September 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal, Done was being investigated by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The Verge

He and Brody are charged with reacting to that investigation by obstructing justice: deleting documents and other communications, encrypting their messages versus using company email, and failing to produce documents to a Federal grand jury.

Despite Cerebral’s far higher profile and volume, even with an ongoing investigation not only on prescribing but also on ad trackers [TTA 9 Feb 2023], the prosecution of Done’s head executives on criminal drug distribution charges is the first brought by the Justice Department against a digital health company for violations related to the CSA and drug prescribing regulations plus fraud.

In this Editor’s view, the relaxation of teleprescribing Schedule II drugs for three years invited abuse. Done may be the first, but it won’t be the last. See the prediction 8 July 2022 made by a former state ADA that both the Feds and states won’t stop at prescribing but will go on to telehealth billing (scroll to last item).

Done has not made any statements directly to press to date, save a short statement on their website:

Done Global strongly disagrees with the criminal charges filed last week against our founder, Ruthia He, and Dr. David Brody, which are based on events that principally occurred between February 2020 and January 2023. Since our founding, Done Global has worked to make mental health care accessible for tens of thousands of Americans trapped in a spiraling national crisis. Done Global will continue to operate – and do everything in our power to ensure that tens of thousands Americans that rely on us do not lose access to their mental health care. At the same time, we will continue to support our clinicians as they exercise independent clinical judgment, practice evidence-based medicine, and provide best-in-class health care.

Update: This statement has been expanded since our original article. Notably, the company declares that “Done is fully aligned with the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Justice on eliminating drug abuse in America” and that they have protocols in place to prevent abuse. Done is also committed to continuing normal operations. Full text is here. David Brody is still listed as clinical president on the medical team page. Ruthia He is not listed on the website at all nor are other company leaders. Press releases posted on the site end in 2022.

Mobihealthnews and Fierce Healthcare essentially recap the DOJ release. The Verge includes the text of the 22-page indictment at the end of their article. 

Editor’s Note: On 30 May, TTA included a Perspectives article on collaborative care authored by Sussan Nwogwugwu, DNP, PMHNP, Clinical Leader at Done. This contributed article was non-promotional and primarily about alleviating clinician burnout. It briefly mentions technology in telehealth with one mention of ADHD as an example.