Global Courant
William VanWhy says he felt emotionally overwhelmed when he enrolled in the mental health department at Northwest Medical Center in Arkansas last year. Four days later, he was still in the locked unit, but he desperately wanted to leave.
“I received no medical care at all,” said 32-year-old VanWhy.
Psychiatric patients in Arkansas can be held against their will for 72 hours if they pose a danger to themselves or others. But to keep them longer, a medical provider must file a court petition and get a judge’s permission.
No petition was filed in VanWhy’s case, and his partner eventually succeeded in obtaining a court order for his release with the help of a lawyer.
A few hours later, a sheriff’s deputy walked into the hospital with the warrant in hand and VanWhy’s husband at his side. In the elevator they met a nurse from his ward.
“I’m glad he’s released,” the nurse said, according to bodycam footage obtained by NBC News. “Don’t repeat that.”
VanWhy was released about 20 minutes later. “Oh my god. You saved my life,” he told the deputy, bodycam footage shows.
The man who led the unit at the time, Dr. Brian Hyatt, was one of Arkansas’s foremost psychiatrists and the president of the Board that Disciplines Physicians. But he is now under investigation by state and federal authorities investigating charges ranging from Medicaid fraud to false imprisonment.
VanWhy’s release marked the second time in two months that a patient was only released from Hyatt’s department after a sheriff’s deputy showed up with a court order, according to court documents.
“I think they had a plan to keep people as long as possible, to bill their insurance for as long as possible before they got kicked out the door and then fill the bed with someone else,” said Aaron Cash, an attorney representing VanWhy.
Dr. Brian Hyatt describes the additional entry door in one of the Northwest Medical Center-Springdale medical-psychiatric rooms in 2018.Arkansas Democratic Gazette
VanWhy and at least 25 other former patients sued Hyatt for alleging that they were held against their will in his unit days and sometimes weeks. And the office of Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin has accused Hyatt of running an insurance scam, claiming to treat patients he rarely saw and then billing Medicaid with “the highest code for every patient,” according to a search warrant affidavit.
As the lawsuits piled up, Hyatt continued to chair the Arkansas State Medical Board. But he resigned from the board in late May after Drug Enforcement Administration agents executed a search warrant in his private practice.
“I am not resigning because of any misconduct on my part, but so that the board can continue its important work without delay or distraction,” he wrote in a letter. “I will continue to defend myself in the proper forum against the false accusations made against me.”
Northwest Medical Center in Springdale “abruptly terminated” Hyatt’s contract in May 2022, according to the attorney general’s affidavit.
In April, the hospital agreed to pay $1.1 million in a settlement with the Arkansas attorney general’s office. Northwest Medical Center was unable to provide sufficient documentation justifying the hospitalization of 246 patients detained in Hyatt’s ward, according to the attorney general’s office.
As part of the settlement, the hospital denied any wrongdoing.
“We believe that hospital staff complied in all respects with Arkansas law, which relies heavily on the treating physician’s assessment of the patient, including in decisions related to involuntary admission,” Aimee Morell, a spokeswoman for Northwest Health, said in a statement.
“While it is not our practice to comment on pending litigation, I can say that last spring we took a number of actions to ensure the safety of our patients, including hiring new healthcare providers responsible for the clinical care of our behavioral health patients in early May 2022,” added Morrell.
Hyatt, 50, has not been charged with a crime. Neither he nor his lawyer responded to multiple requests for comment.
But his legal team issued a statement Business in Arkansas last month.
“Dr. Hyatt continues to maintain his innocence and denies the allegations against him,” the statement said. “Despite his career as an outstanding clinician, Dr. Hyatt has become the target of a vicious, orchestrated assault on his character and service. He looks forward to defending himself in court.”
Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin declined to comment. “We cannot provide any additional details at this time,” he said.
Charlie Robbins, a spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Arkansas, said the execution of a search warrant “is an important step in any lengthy, ongoing investigation.
“Given that this investigation is still ongoing, we will not be making any additional comments,” he said.
Huge Medicaid payouts
A graduate of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Hyatt was named medical director of the Northwest Medical Center’s Division of Behavioral Health in January 2018.
The number of beds expanded from 25 to 75, and claims on Medicaid and Medicare, as well as private insurance, increased, according to the Arkansas attorney general’s affidavit.
Hyatt was paid $1,367 a day, according to a report prepared by the Arkansas attorney general’s office. And at the same time, he also ran his own private practice, Pinnacle Premier Psychiatry, in the town of Rogers, about 25 miles away, according to the attorney general’s office.
The claims he filed revealed that he conducted daily face-to-face evaluations with patients in the hospital.
But a former staffer came forward in April 2022 and told state investigators that Hyatt spent only a few minutes a day on the floor with patients and that Dr. Hyatt had no contact with patients,” the affidavit says.
Investigators reviewed 45 days of surveillance footage from the facility and concluded that Hyatt entered or interacted with a patient’s room only 17 times — less than 10 minutes in all, according to the attorney general’s report.
“Dr. Hyatt never even had a single conversation with the vast majority of patients under his care,” the affidavit says.
Shannon Williams, 52, says she was one such patient.
Williams, a nurse from Harrison, was grappling with the death of her grandmother when she learned that her brother had died of Covid abroad. The news pushed Williams, who herself worked in a Covid unit, into what she described as “crisis mode.”
She ended up in the emergency room of a hospital about 90 minutes from Springdale in February 2021. The next morning, she was transferred to Hyatt’s ward after a doctor determined she was a danger to herself, according to medical records. (Williams claims she was not suicidal.)
Nurse Shannon Williams.NBC news
Upon arrival at the unit, Williams said she was stripped against her will and injected with a sedative.
“I was terrified,” said Williams.
According to her medical records, she was detained for five days despite her requests to leave.
“It was like being in a prison,” said Williams, a mother of three. “It was like a nightmare. If I cried, I was again threatened with more time.”
According to the search warrant affidavit, Hyatt’s Medicaid claims dwarfed those of other Arkansas psychiatrists.
From January 2019 to June 2022, Medicaid paid more than $800,000 to Hyatt’s facility.
“Dr. Hyatt is a clear outlier, and his claims are so high that they skew the averages of certain codes for the entire Medicaid program in Arkansas,” the affidavit says.
Medicaid uses a coding system to determine how much providers should pay — billing the highest codes at the highest rates because those patients require more care.
It is common for a newly admitted patient to come in with the highest code for severity, suggesting the person is unstable and dealing with a serious problem, and then move on to a lower code before being released.
But 99.95% of Hyatt’s Medicaid claims came in with the most expensive code, the affidavit says.
“According to the allegations filed by Dr. Hyatt and the non-physician physicians working under his supervision, no patient treated at the Northwest Medical Center’s Behavioral Unit ever got better, at least not before the day of the patient’s release,” the affidavit says.
Mocking emails
Before coming to represent VanWhy, Cash had a bizarre interaction with Hyatt about another patient.
In January 2022, Cash faxed the hospital demanding the immediate release of his client, a patient named Karla Adrian-Caceres.
Adrian-Caceres had arrived at the unit the day before and was screaming to leave, according to a lawsuit she filed in January 2023.
Adrian-Caceres’ mother went to the hospital to pick her up but was told her daughter would not be released, the lawsuit said. The next morning, Hyatt responded to Cash by email, saying he would neither confirm nor deny that Adrian-Caceres was in his unit.
“Our facility is receiving your silly demands and defamatory comments about someone you claim to represent who is allegedly in our facility,” Hyatt said in the email, which was included in Adrian-Caceres’ lawsuit.
Hyatt said he would only check if she was there if Cash got his client to sign a “release of information form.”
Cash responded four hours later with a court order demanding Adrian-Caceres’ release.
Cash gave the court order to Adrian-Caceres’ mother and she took her to the hospital, but the hospital still refused to release her daughter.
So Cash got a second court order, and the judge ordered the sheriff’s office to enforce it, according to her lawsuit.
A sheriff’s deputy went to the facility with Adrian-Caceres’ mother and secured her release, according to documentation obtained by NBC News from the sheriff’s office.
The next morning, Hyatt emailed Cash, mocking the colleges he attended.
“I think this is what they teach at Poteau Junior College… sorry… Carl Albert State and Northeastern State University,” Hyatt said in the email.
He instructed Cash to contact his attorney. “You won’t find it in your ‘university’ yearbook,” he wrote.
When Cash learned of VanWhy’s husband two months later, he didn’t bother to get the patient released on his own.
“I went straight to the sheriff this time,” Cash said.
William VanWhy, left, and his husband, Cameron Tryon.William VanWhy
Cash said the patients he spoke to were adamant that they received virtually no care while being held in Hyatt’s ward. These were people who were vulnerable and often needed serious support or therapy, he said.
“Some of them needed help,” Cash said. “And what they got was hurt.”