Done: Paid to Refill, Unpaid to Follow Up

In the Done fraud case, criminal trial evidence showed how a telehealth subscription business paid clinicians for prescriptions while refusing to pay for follow-up care. Automatic refill requests kept prescriptions moving. Done ignored clinical warnings and gave insurers false accounts of the care patients had received. The people setting compensation, building the software and answering pharmacies were part of the story alongside the people signing prescriptions.

A federal jury convicted Done’s founder and clinical president of controlled-substance offenses and a health care fraud conspiracy in November 2025. The founder was also convicted of an obstruction conspiracy. The case reaches inside a business where keeping a subscription alive meant keeping the medication coming.

Done’s Subscription Model and Platform Control

Done sold monthly access to online ADHD diagnosis, treatment and medication refills. The June 2024 criminal indictment alleged that the business arranged prescriptions for more than 40 million pills of Adderall and other stimulants and obtained more than $100 million in revenue.

The indictment identified separate businesses behind the Done name. Done Global was the company led by the founder. Done Health was a California corporation whose sole incorporator was the clinical president. Prosecutors alleged that the founder actually controlled the operation and that Done Health created a false appearance of clinical independence.

That distinction matters in the telehealth trade. A platform can supply the technology, scheduling, billing and record storage while a separate professional entity retains the clinicians. In this case, the Justice Department’s trial account said the founder, who had no medical training, ultimately approved clinical practices while the business told outsiders it had independent clinical leadership.

The growth strategy started before a patient reached a clinician. According to the criminal trial account, Done spent over $40 million on deceptive social-media advertising that encouraged people struggling with a lack of structure during the pandemic to believe they had ADHD. It also bought keyword advertisements aimed at people seeking Adderall without a legal prescription.

Advertising brought in the member. The subscription brought in recurring revenue. The clinician’s signature supplied the prescription that kept that arrangement going. An insider who knows only the marketing budget or only the appointment system may still know a consequential part of how the business worked.

Paying for Prescriptions and Discouraging Follow-Up

The indictment alleged that Done paid prescribers according to the number of patients for whom they wrote prescriptions each month, while refusing to pay for consultation time or medical services after the initial visit.

The indictment also alleged that Done limited the clinical information available to prescribers, required initial encounters to last under 30 minutes and instructed clinicians to prescribe stimulants even when a member did not qualify. It said the company advertised a range of medical treatments while offering few alternatives to Adderall and other stimulants.

The Justice Department’s July 2026 account of the criminal trial described clinicians earning up to $60,000 per month while signing Adderall prescriptions every 30 seconds. It also described clinicians being refused employment or fired when they would not participate.

Automatic Requests Replaced Continuing Contact

According to the criminal trial account, Done’s auto-refill feature generated a message requesting another prescription after an initial diagnosis. Prescribers kept signing without continuing clinical interaction. Some patients went years without seeing clinicians, and prescriptions continued through involuntary psychiatric holds or after patients had died.

An automatically generated request could keep the prescription process moving without a new conversation. That is why the origin of a message matters as much as its presence in a patient record. A software-generated request and a clinician’s follow-up assessment describe very different work.

Bridge Prescriptions Without Patient Review

The clinical president’s bridge prescriptions show what happened when a refill moved to a prescriber who had never evaluated the patient. The indictment alleged that Done transferred members to replacement prescribers who had neither examined them in person nor consulted with them by video, then had those prescribers issue stimulants without such an encounter.

The later criminal trial account supplied the clinical president’s own prescribing figures: 394,324 Schedule II stimulant pills for 6,559 Done members. The person running Done’s clinical care had never evaluated those members or reviewed their patient records. The Justice Department reported that he said each refill took 30 seconds because he did not check the records.

The department also quoted how he described his desired job to the founder:

The transfer and record-access history can show whether the replacement prescriber knew anything about the person receiving the drug.

The indictment also alleged that Done had prescribers write controlled-substance prescriptions in states where they lacked the required authorization and licensing, including violations of nurse-practitioner supervision requirements. For credentialing staff, the assignment of a patient to a prescriber is another part of the same workflow.

Warnings Reached Management and Prescriptions Continued

Clinical leaders and family members warned Done about its prescribing, according to the Justice Department’s criminal trial account. Management nevertheless prohibited independent practitioners from discharging patients. Families reported bipolar disorder, Adderall-induced psychosis and other conditions that could worsen with continued stimulant use, yet prescriptions continued.

Three mothers testified about their efforts to get Done to stop prescribing to their children. Internal complaints, discharge requests and the prescriptions issued afterward tell that story in a way a count of appointments cannot.

Pharmacy Blocks and Mindful Mental Wellness

According to the criminal trial account, national pharmacy chains began blocking Done prescriptions over safety concerns. The defendants responded with false assurances about compliance and created Mindful Mental Wellness to get around those blocks.

The Justice Department’s December 2025 corporate-indictment announcement gives the entity change its context. It alleged that pharmacies were refusing prescriptions from Done Health’s prescribers and that Done Global incorporated Mindful Mental Wellness, a Florida medical practice, to circumvent the refusals. That separate indictment charged Done Global and Mindful Mental Wellness with participating in the prescribing scheme.

For someone inside pharmacy relations, credentialing or operations, the connection is concrete: the blocked professional entity, the reasons the pharmacy gave, the representations made in response and the entity used afterward. A new company name could allow the same prescription business to continue past a pharmacy’s refusal.

False Prior Authorizations Kept Insurers Paying

According to the criminal trial account, false prior authorizations connected Done’s subscription model to Medicare, Medicaid and commercial-insurance payments for medication. The defendants wanted members to keep paying monthly fees and made false statements so insurance would cover the Adderall dispensed at pharmacies.

The requests represented that Done used DSM-5 criteria to diagnose ADHD, used urine drug screens and had tried non-stimulant treatment without success. Prosecutors showed that the representations were false. Medicare and Medicaid paid for drugs on the strength of those false accounts of care. Taxpayers helped keep the subscription business going. The Justice Department’s July 2026 criminal-case account reported payments by Medicare, Medicaid and commercial insurers exceeding approximately $12.3 million.

Members paid Done for subscriptions. Insurers paid for drugs dispensed at pharmacies. Prescribers were compensated under the platform’s own terms. Connecting those transactions explains why someone who handled authorizations or pharmacy correspondence could know about false insurance claims without working in an insurer’s billing department.

For a healthcare whistleblower case, we examine the clinical statement, the person or system that supplied it, the prescription it supported and the government payment it caused. The payment trail gives an internal instruction its consequence outside the company.

Deleted Records and the Move Away From Company Systems

The criminal trial evidence showed that the founder moved operations to China to make personnel and evidence unavailable to investigators. After Done received a grand jury subpoena, she directed employees to discuss sensitive business on encrypted applications, including Signal and WhatsApp, instead of the company systems being collected for production.

The Justice Department’s account described disappearing messages, personal deletion of incriminating material and instructions to employees to delete documents and messages from company servers. Its earlier verdict announcement identified deleted language encouraging providers to prescribe Adderall even to patients without ADHD.

The communications concerned the same prescribing policies the business was defending publicly. Someone who saw a directive before it disappeared, or knew why a discussion moved off the company platform, could explain a decision that the remaining patient charts would not show.

What Are the Common Warning Signs of Fraud?

In Done’s case, the warning signs worked together: pay tied to continuing prescriptions, unpaid follow-up, automated refill requests, clinical objections overridden and false statements to pharmacies and insurers. The useful connection is between the operating rule and what happened to a particular prescription or claim.

The HHS Office of Inspector General’s telemedicine alert identifies inadequate patient contact or information, compensation tied to orders, restricted product choices and missing follow-up among the features of suspect arrangements. Those are useful places to examine how a platform directs clinical work.

Cerebral also admitted using prescription targets in its criminal non-prosecution agreement.

What Evidence Is Needed to Prove Fraud?

Proving platform-prescribing fraud means connecting pay, patient contact, prescriptions and the insurer’s payment. That is the work we do with you. We work with the person who understands those connections: the clinician who saw a refusal reversed, the employee who handled a pharmacy block or the product specialist who knows how refill requests were generated.

We work through the platform’s contracts and records with you to connect what clinicians were paid to do, what happened with patients and who controlled the process.

The same approach connects a prior authorization to the underlying clinical record and the resulting pharmacy claim. A statement that treatment failed has a different meaning when the patient history shows whether that treatment was ever tried. Your knowledge of how the platform actually operated can make that difference visible.

We assess the government-payment connection with you and bring in telehealth fraud whistleblower lawyers who understand prescribing and insurance claims. A whistleblower case under the False Claims Act can pay 15% to 30% of what the government recovers.

You Know Who Kept the Refills Moving

If you saw a clinical objection overruled, a pharmacy block bypassed or an insurance answer supplied without the care behind it, tell our whistleblower experts what happened inside the platform. We build your strongest telehealth whistleblower case around what you know, bring in telehealth fraud whistleblower lawyers and stay beside you as partners through the case.