CONCORD — A former chief medical officer at New London Hospital has pleaded guilty to health care fraud over his role in a scheme to bilk Medicare by prescribing unnecessary medical devices for beneficiaries, with whom in most cases he had not consulted or communicated.

Dr. Steven Powell, formerly of Grantham but now a resident of Georgia, pleaded guilty April 26 in a New Hampshire U.S. District Court to health care fraud after federal prosecutors charged him with colluding with people at two purported telehealth companies to submit more than $1.9 million in fallacious claims to Medicare, according to court documents. The crimes were committed after Powell resigned from New London Hospital.

Powell, 53, is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 30. The charge can carry up to 10 years in prison, but the prosecutors will recommend a prison sentence of three years and eight months at the hearing, according to the plea agreement accepted by the court on May 24.

In addition, Powell must pay $761,000 in restitution to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the plea agreement says.

Powell and two attorneys listed in court records as representing him did not respond to messages requesting comment sent to their email addresses on Friday.

A spokesperson for New London Hospital did not respond to a message seeking comment on Monday.

Powell worked at New London Hospital for more than 15 years, according to his profile on professional networking site LinkedIn.

Online biographical information for Powell identifies him as having attended college and medical school in Georgia, and earning a Master of Public Health degree in health policy and clinical practice from The Dartmouth Institute at Dartmouth College. He completed a combined residency in psychiatry and internal medicine at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, where he had also been chief resident in the departments of internal medicine and psychiatry.

According to the government’s indictment, Powell — who resigned from New London Hospital in 2018 to join MedOptions, a Connecticut-based provider of behavioral services to skilled nursing and assisted living facilities — colluded with “accomplices” at two “purported” telehealth companies over a three-month period from December 2018 to February 2019 to sign orders for such medical devices as off-the-shelf ankle, knee, back, elbow and hand braces for Medicare patients.

The indictment does not identify the people or companies involved with Powell in the scheme.

Powell was sent “pre-filled unsigned prescriptions” for Medicare beneficiaries by contacts “working on behalf” of the two unidentified telehealth companies for him to electronically sign, the indictment alleged, which further said for each order Powell signed he received approximately a $15 payment, or kickback.

As a result the signed bogus orders induced the medical device suppliers to ship the braces to Medicare beneficiaries and then submit the claims to Medicare for reimbursement.

The fraudulent false claims submitted to Medicare for the braces were neither medically necessary nor eligible for reimbursement from Medicare, according to the indictment.

Powell “ordered braces that were medically unnecessary for Medicare beneficiaries with whom he lacked a pre-existing medical practitioner-patient relationship, with a physical examination and/or without communicating substantively with the Medicare beneficiary,” the indictment said.

Prosecutors said that the doctors’ orders that Powell electronically signed and returned to one of the two telehealth companies were used to fraudulently bill “at least” $1,908,702.65 for “medically unnecessary” medical devices, of which Medicare paid the device providers about $761,000.

The indictment does not reveal how investigators were alerted to or uncovered the scheme.

Powell was active in educating the public in the Upper Valley about addiction issues and in 2016 received approval from the Grantham Planning Board on a site plan application to open medical offices with a partner at Sawyer Brook Plaza in Grantham.

At a medical conference in 2011 in Canada, Powell related how once, when he was an emergency room physician at New London Hospital in 2008, he called upon the U.S. military to dispatch a Chinook helicopter from Connecticut to transport a 1,018-pound man who was in respiratory arrest to DHMC because the patient was too heavy for conventional ground transportation vehicles.

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.