False Docs

In his scrubs or a lab coat, Wayel Noureldin looked like any of the 400 would-be doctors making rounds at the University of Kansas Medical Center last January.

As a fourth-year graduate student in neurology, Noureldin examined patients who were suffering from dementia caused by diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, and he prescribed drugs to help them cope. The 45-year-old immigrant from Cairo, Egypt, had three kids, a white Ford Taurus and a modest house on South 31st Street in Kansas City, Kansas.

But federal agents arrested Noureldin at his home in late October 2003, charging him with fraud. Since the late 1980s, he had used three different Social Security cards and at least six aliases — Wayel Aly Nour El Din, Wayel Aly Moustafa, Wayel Aly Nureldin, Wayel Aly Noureldin, Wayel A.M. Nur Eldin and Wayel Aly M. Nour Eldin — to fool medical programs into letting him practice on their patients. Now he’s in the Leavenworth Detention Center, and KU Medical Center may owe the government more than $30,000 for services billed by the fake doctor.

The details of Noureldin’s past have blurred, but according to the federal indictment and Noureldin’s old résumés, he started aiding doctors with general surgery and diagnoses in pediatrics, orthopedics, radiology and OB/GYN wards in November 1981, when he was a student at Dasr-el Eini Hospital in Cairo. A year later, he jumped to a full-time residency position at a second Cairo hospital.

By 1988, he was working in the United States. Later, federal agents would discover that the Social Security number he had obtained here belonged to a two-year-old kid. That same year, Noureldin applied for and received a second Social Security number under the name Wayel Aly Noureldin. On future paperwork, he would claim he had been working as a waiter, salesman and parking attendant in New Jersey since 1981.

By the early ’90s, he had earned an internship in internal medicine at Salem Hospital in Massachusetts. Going by the name Wayel Aly Moustafa in December 1993, he was working a midday shift at the emergency room when a drunk 35-year-old woman stumbled through the door and asked to be admitted to a detox program. At about 3 p.m. that day, Noureldin and a nurse entered her room to gather vital statistics. Ten minutes later, he went back to the woman’s room alone. When a nurse returned to talk with the woman, she was screaming that Noureldin had tried to rape her. Noureldin denied wrongdoing; an hour later, the patient fled the hospital.

But after Noureldin’s shift ended, police say he went to the patient’s house with two pizzas. According to the woman’s medical charts, she hadn’t eaten in seven days; he reportedly used the food to coax her into inviting him into the house. She alleged that he raped her, but during the ensuing police investigation, she said she had been so intoxicated that she didn’t remember whether she had consented. Noureldin was never charged.

Still, the Massachusetts medical board found Noureldin guilty of abusing his position, a “gross misconduct in the practice of medicine.” The board revoked his license and added his name to the National Practitioner Databank, a malpractice watch list. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services placed Noureldin on its Office of the Inspector General Exclusions Program database. Being in that database prohibited Noureldin from participating in any U.S. Department of Health and Human Services program, including Medicare and Medicaid; he could not work with patients receiving federal aid.

In September 1996, Noureldin obtained a third Social Security number, this one for Wayel A.M. Nur Eldin.

According to his new résumé, he’d spent the past 15 years as an attending physician in Badran Hospital in Cairo. Officials at the State Education Department of New York granted him a limited permit do general bedside work at a Brooklyn hospital. Less than a year later, Noureldin asked his colleagues to send letters recommending that he be accepted into KU’s graduate medical program.

In October 2000, Noureldin enrolled as a neurology resident at KU Medical Center. He spent the next four years gaining hands-on experience at the medical center and at KU affiliates Children’s Mercy Hospital and the VA Medical Centers in Kansas City and Leavenworth. At one point, poor test results landed him on academic probation; still, he was paid a learning stipend of more than $40,000 a year. In May 2003, he accepted a position as a clinical neurophysiology fellow to learn about neuromuscular diseases such as epilepsy.

But he’d been careless. Although Noureldin had applied for classes at KU using his newest Social Security number, he had given KU Medical Center’s payroll department the Social Security number he had used in Massachusetts. Last August, KU’s payroll department noticed the discrepancy and asked Noureldin to contact the Social Security Administration.

“I have discovered that, by accident, I applied for and received a second Social Security card without realizing it,” Noureldin wrote to the SSA. He asked that his original card be canceled, then asked the KU payroll department to change his name to Wayel Alymoustafa Eldin.

The odd request caused concern among KU administrators. An August 11 e-mail sent from Associate Dean of Graduate Medical Education Dan Wilson to the payroll department reads: “There are serious implications involved in this case … I would think twice before I change his name … because you will not be able to track this person with the Registrar’s Office, GME office and any external organization in the future.”

KU officials contacted the Kansas Board of Healing Arts, which began an investigation. Meanwhile, Noureldin had used his false information to apply for a medical license in Lansing, Michigan, sources say. There, someone checked one of his Social Security numbers and discovered he’d never earned wages on it. After Michigan officials referred Noureldin’s case to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, federal agents arrested him in late October.

Though Noureldin had been supervised by an attending physician at KU, he had consulted with patients who then submitted Medicare claims. KU also had named him as an intern in residence on cost reports it submitted to Medicare for stipend reimbursement. After Noureldin was arrested, the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services sent KU an invoice for reimbursement of fraudulent billing totaling more than $48,000. KU has disputed some of the charges, claiming an attending physician signed off on all of Noureldin’s diagnoses. Still, the medical center’s teaching branch may have to repay about $30,000 in Medicare subsidies that had been provided for Noureldin’s graduate medical education.

Since Noureldin’s arrest, KU has tightened its system for conducting background checks. “We have added some extra layers of investigating that we didn’t think were necessary before,” says Dennis McCulloch, a spokesman for the medical center. “We really don’t want to go into them, because we don’t want people to figure out ways around them.”

Noureldin has pleaded guilty to one count of fraud. Noureldin’s attorney, John O’Connor, tells the Pitch his client will not explain his motivations for assuming multiple identities before his sentencing April 23.

KU officials say they doubt Noureldin could have hurt any patients. “The public is put in jeopardy when a practitioner having a record of misconduct with patients is able to interact with patients under a different name,” McCulloch says. He adds there was “no issue” with Noureldin’s “medical knowledge or expertise” — only with his “ethical manner.”

But on February 26, 2001, a woman was hospitalized at the Kansas City VA Medical Center for seizures and chest pain. On March 1, she notified a nurse that her doctor had fondled her breasts and molested her. “I was uncomfortable with what he was doing,” the woman reported.

At the time, KU investigated the case and cleared the doctor of wrongdoing. His résumé was spotless. His name: Wayel Noureldin.