A group of cardiac monitoring companies and an executive have agreed to pay a combined $13.45 million to settle allegations that they improperly overbilled Medicare, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday.

According to the Justice Department, Spectocor and its owner, Joseph Bogdan, as well as Medi-Lynx Cardiac Monitoring and its current majority owner, Medicalgorithmics SA, allegedly violated the False Claims Act by billing Medicare for more expensive levels of cardiac monitoring services than were actually requested by the ordering physician.

From 2011 to 2016, Bogdan and Spectocor, headquartered in McKinney, Texas, marketed the Pocket ECG as capable of performing three separate types of cardiac monitoring services. When a doctor went to enroll a patient for Pocket ECG, however, the physician was only allowed to enroll for the service that provided the highest rate of reimbursement under a patient's insurance policy, thereby steering the ordering doctor to a more costly level of service, the DOJ alleged. In 2013, Medi-Lynx, a related company headquartered in Plano, Texas, began selling the Pocket ECG with the same fraudulent enrollment procedure, according to the DOJ. Warsaw, Poland-based Medicalgorithmics acquired a controlling interest in Medi-Lynx in September 2016, the agency added.