Icon (Close Menu)

Logout

Arkansas Business Wrote About Police Investigating Richard Johns in 2012

2 min read

You might caught the story yesterday (and this morning) about Little Rock internist Dr. Richard Johns, who’s been arrested and charged with more than 180 counts of fraudulent practices — namely, writing fraudulent prescriptions.

The Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office, which handled the arrest, said it began its investigation into Johns in November after an overdose death in Cabot. Investigators traced the death back to one of the fraudulent prescriptions allegedly written by Johns.

Arkansas Business readers have had reason to be wary of Johns.

In 2012, Editor Gwen Moritz wrote that Johns was under investigation by Little Rock Police in connection to sexual misconduct allegations by at least two women. There was an element of fraudulent prescriptions to those accusations:

In a circuitous way, the dropping of criminal charges against the former office manager at Johns’ practice – Practice Management Services Inc., known as the Physicians Group in the Doctor’s Building on South University Avenue – has reopened the legal path for the earliest of the complaints, a long-simmering sexual discrimination claim that set a new legal precedent.

In that case, originally filed in federal court in Little Rock in 2009, a registered nurse named Rhonda Calaway alleges that Johns filed a false claim against her – that she wrote prescriptions for herself under Johns’ name – with the Arkansas State Board of Nursing after she complained of repeated inappropriate comments during the six months she worked for him in 2007.

At the time, the Arkansas State Medical Board hadn’t disciplined Johns, although it had investigated sexual misconduct claims brought by at least one patient. The Medical Board sent the patient a letter, dated Oct. 19, 2010, saying that it found “no evidence of a violation of the Arkansas Medical Practices Act” and took no disciplinary action. 

That same patient then took her complaint to the LRPD, which took her statement that same month and began investigating what the police report termed “sexual assault.”

As for Calaway, Moritz reported that she accepted a consent order by the Board of Nursing that caused her RN license to be on probation for a year.

She completed her probationary period, and her attorney told Moritz that Calaway “still absolutely denies having done anything wrong. She has never wavered in her position” that Johns authorized the prescriptions she filled.

Moritz’s reporting turned up another nurse who worked for Johns and accused him of wrongdoing.

In 2003, Tamara Fusilier Baker accused Johns of violating the privacy restrictions of HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act, by sharing her medical records with her ex-husband for use in a custody dispute:

After Baker, whose last name was then Fusilier, made her complaint to the Arkansas State Medical Board, Johns reported Baker to the Board of Nursing. 

Baker’s license was on professional probation for the next two years, and she filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2004.

At the time, an investigation by the state Medical Board found no evidence of a violation by Dr. Johns.

Send this to a friend