On November 10, 2011, Dr. David R. Harmon — a 59-year-old interventional cardiologist operating a private practice in Salisbury, Maryland, with hospital privileges at Peninsula Regional Medical Center — was sentenced to 97 months in federal prison after a jury convicted him on July 26, 2011, of 6 counts of health care fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1347 following a two-week trial in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. Judge William D. Quarles Jr. also ordered $579,070 in restitution to Medicare and other health insurance programs and an equal amount in criminal forfeiture. Federal investigators, led by the FBI's Baltimore field office and HHS-OIG's Philadelphia region, determined that from at least April 2003 through May 2007 Harmon had falsified cardiac angiogram interpretations in patient medical records — fabricating or exaggerating the presence of coronary blockages — to justify implanting medically unnecessary cardiac stents in more than 100 patients at PRMC, with the broader investigative scope exceeding 200 unnecessary procedures. Harmon then ordered medically unnecessary Cardiolite stress tests, echocardiograms, and EKGs as follow-up care and billed the costs to Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers, generating at least $579,070 in fraudulent reimbursements. The scheme surfaced only after an anonymous tip prompted PRMC to audit its stenting records following Harmon's March 2007 resignation — which he attributed to a visual impairment — after which the hospital's internal review identified at least 25 unnecessary stents before federal investigators expanded the count. One month after Harmon's conviction, PRMC paid $1.8 million to settle a civil claim that senior hospital staff had failed to act on complaints about his stenting patterns during the entire conduct period. Among those subjected to unnecessary open-heart procedures was a patient whose own angiogram images showed no coronary blockage requiring intervention — images that independent expert cardiologists reviewed at trial and found flatly contradicted every word Harmon had written in that patient's medical record.