After voluntarily checking himself into the mental health unit for anxiety and depression at Northwest Medical Center in Springdale, Arkansas, in March 2022, William VanWhy found himself confined and unable to leave, although there was no court order keeping him there.
It was like a horror movie in real life, he told The Epoch Times.
“As soon as I got there, I knew something wasn’t right,” Mr. VanWhy said. “I wasn’t receiving any care. I was there for five days, and I never met with any doctor.”
When he saw that he wouldn’t be treated, he began asking to leave, he said, but his requests were met with opposition.
“I felt trapped, completely,” Mr. VanWhy recalled.
Mr. VanWhy’s story isn’t the only one.
The Herrera Law Group has taken on 90 clients and filed 28 lawsuits for patients who tell similar stories about what they describe as “false imprisonment” in the behavioral health unit of the hospital, beginning in January 2022 with Karla Adrian-Caceres who, unlike Mr. VanWhy, was admitted to the unit involuntarily after being treated in the hospital’s emergency room for a potential overdose on Tylenol.
Staff refused Ms. Adrian-Caceres’ request to go home after being checked out, and she was told that she would be admitted to “the third floor” for observation, according to the complaint (pdf).
When she exited the elevator, she was stripped naked, searched, and issued institutional clothing.
When she again asked to leave, she was told she had to stay and that if she attempted to go, they would get a court order for her to stay longer.
Involuntary Hold
Aaron Cash, an attorney with the law firm, first heard from Ms. Adrian-Caceres’ mother when she called him to see what he could do to get her daughter out.
“I spoke with the patient and determined that there was no court order to keep her there, so I sent a fax over to the hospital saying that she wanted to leave and that her mother would be coming to pick her up,” Mr. Cash told The Epoch Times.
When her mother came to pick her up, a staff member told her they weren’t aware of Mr. Cash’s letter of release, and that Ms. Adrian-Caceres said she didn’t want to leave.
“This, of course, was a lie,” the complaint states. “At no point during this encounter did staff speak to Plaintiff or advise her that her mother was there to pick her up, and Plaintiff never told staff that she wanted to stay in the Unit.”
Mr. Cash filed a habeas corpus petition requesting emergency relief from the Washington County Circuit Court to order Ms. Adrian-Caceres’ release.
That night, according to the complaint, Ms. Adrian-Caceres’ phone privileges were restricted.
The next morning, Mr. Cash contacted Dr. Brian Hyatt, the director of the unit at that time.
Dr. Hyatt, a leading psychiatrist in the state, responded to Mr. Cash with an email making light of Mr. Cash’s request with insults.
“If you could possibly ‘coerce’ your alleged client to sign a release of information form, we will check to see if this is actually a patient within our facility and then would be able to address your ill-informed and libelous claims and get them forwarded to our team of attorneys so that they can absorb your posturing and puffery,” the email stated.
Dr. Hyatt was director of the behavioral health unit from 2018 until May 2022, when, according to court records, his contract “was abruptly terminated.”
Staff Allegedly Ignored Court Order
Despite the court order, staff members told Ms. Adrian-Caceres’ mother that her daughter has been put on an “involuntary hold and was not going to be released regardless of what the Judge had ordered,” the complaint states.
“Ms. Caceres began questioning if they understood the significance of the Court Order and explained that they had no authority to disobey it,” the complaint continues. “The staff members laughed at Ms. Caceres, circled a paragraph in the Order which they claimed was not true and made the Order invalid, threw the Order in the floor, and went back to the Unit.”
From there, Ms. Adrian-Caceres was threatened by Dr. Hyatt to drop the case, then sedated and taken to the “fourth floor” to be held for 40 days.
At this point, the defendants hadn’t filed for a court order for involuntary commitment, which Mr. Cash said he found was common with each plaintiff.
The court amended the order for Ms. Adrian-Caceres’ release that brought in the Washington County Sheriff’s Department to escort her out.
Before she was released, while sedated on the fourth floor, she was coerced into signing a voluntary consent form, according to the complaint, in order to mislead the sheriff’s department into believing she didn’t want to go home and allowing for Dr. Hyatt to make a false entry stating that she was “unlawfully removed,” “left the unit sobbing,” and “begging to stay and stating that she needed help.”
Dr. Hyatt sent Mr. Cash another email the next morning making disparaging comments about the universities Mr. Cash attended and the office building in which he works.
“I began wondering what type of person this is who would send an email like that to a lawyer he’s never met and how he’s treating his patients,” Mr. Cash said.
‘A Culture of Fear’
Mr. Cash posted on social media, fishing for information from the public, he said.
“People started coming forward: former patients and employees talking about the abuses they had witnessed or suffered there,” Mr. Cash said. “It just took off from there.”
As allegations of abuse stacked against Dr. Hyatt, Mr. Cash said, the scheme behind the “why” began to emerge.
“It was a culture of fear and sedation to keep people as long as possible to bill their insurance as long as possible until that final day when their insurance was paid without having been helped but hurt, and then they’d fill the bed with the next person,” Mr. Cash said.
The defendants, which include Dr. Hyatt and the hospital, billed the plaintiff and her health insurance carrier BlueCross BlueShield of Texas $19,093.16, according to the complaint, for treatments she didn’t receive and diagnoses she doesn’t have.
Mr. VanWhy’s health insurance carrier was billed $14,452.57, with $13,772.56 paid “or otherwise contractually adjusted by his insurance and an additional $680.01″ owed by Mr. VanWhy, which has since been turned over to a collection agency, Mr. Cash wrote in court documents for Mr. VanWhy’s lawsuit.
According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Dr. Hyatt resigned as chairman of the Arkansas State Medical Board in March after the state’s Medicaid inspector general began investigating him for “credible allegations of fraud.”
Dr. Hyatt had been appointed to the board in 2019 by former Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
In April, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said the state entered a settlement with the hospital over 246 fraudulent Medicaid claims certified by Dr. Hyatt.
“Northwest will repay the state’s Medicaid program $1,112,631.54,” Griffin said in a press release. “My office investigated these claims pursuant to the Arkansas Medicaid False Claims Act, and the settlement is a result of audit work conducted by the Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care (AFMC). AFMC reviewed the medical records submitted by Northwest and determined that on 246 occasions the documentation provided did not justify or support the medical necessity requirement for hospitalizations.”
Whistleblower Complaint
According to the Arkansas Advocate, Dr. Hyatt’s billing practices have been brought into question before, in 2015, 2017, and 2019.
Complaints submitted to the state medical board were dismissed, the article stated.
In January 2023, an investigator with the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit (MFCU) obtained a search and seizure warrant for phone data, which included GPS location, for January 2019 to May 2022.
“During his tenure as the director, there was significant growth in the unit and likewise in the claims and billings submitted to Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurance for patients on the unit,” according to the affidavit (pdf).
In April 2022, the MFCU was contacted by a whistleblower who worked in the behavioral health unit alleging that Dr. Hyatt never met with the patients and that he didn’t want the patients to know his name.
According to the whistleblower, he directed staff to mark out his name on the patients’ armbands, which corroborates what Ms. Adrian-Caceres alleged in her complaint when she reported a staff member concealing his name on her own armband with a marker.
Using surveillance footage from the unit, the MFCU substantiated the whistleblower’s testimony that Dr. Hyatt never met with patients.
Using the data analysis from accountants and auditors with the MFCU, multiple red flags were identified, the report states.
“Dr. Hyatt is a clear outlier, and his claims are so high they skew the averages on certain codes for the entire Medicaid program in Arkansas,” the report states.
According to the report, he used “the highest severity code” on 99.95 percent of his billing between 2019 and 2022, whereas other state psychiatrists used the code for 38.76 percent of billing.
‘Numerous Issues’
A central question to the MFCU investigation is how much time Dr. Hyatt spent in the unit, as he had his own private practice at Pinnacle Premier Psychiatry 25 miles from the hospital in Rogers, Arkansas.
“These allegations raise numerous issues,” the affidavit states. “The patients have a right to their treating physician. If Dr. Hyatt was not their doctor, then who was?”
To date, Dr. Hyatt has not been charged with a crime. The Epoch Times contacted Dr. Hyatt’s private practice for comment.
A spokesperson for Northwest Medical responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment with a statement.
“We take very seriously our responsibility to provide a safe environment of care for our patients and for our team members,” the statement said. “Dr. Hyatt is an independent physician who was contracted to provide clinical care for our hospital’s behavioral health patients. While it is not our practice to comment on pending litigation matters, I can share that last spring, we undertook a number of actions to ensure our patients’ safety, including hiring new providers responsible for the clinical care of our behavioral health patients in early May 2022.”
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