NORTHAMPTON, MA — There are plenty of serious tick-borne disease to worry about in Massachusetts. But there are also some that you don't have to worry about.

A Northampton hospital — part of a larger statewide chain that includes Mass General and Brigham and Women's — will pay the federal government over $11,000 for charging Medicare and Medicaid for testing for diseases from ticks that don't live in Massachusetts, according to federal prosecutors. Cooley Dickinson Hospital, an affiliate of Partner HealthCare, created a testing "panel" that doctors could use rather than selecting individual tests for diseases like Lyme and babesiosis, law enforcement officials said.



"When a [practitioners] selected a testing panel ... an order went to Cooley Dickinson's laboratory to test for all the tick-borne diseases programmed into the testing panel, even though the panel included tests for diseases caused by ticks that were not likely to be present in the geographic region where the individual was bitten," federal prosecutors said in a statement this week. The hospital will pay back $11,332 to the federal government for the unnecessary tests, which were offered between 2014 and 2017, according to prosecutors.