Chesapeake Regional's $19.2 Million Perwaiz Settlement: What Former Patients Should Know

In late October 2026, Chesapeake Regional Medical Center and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia finalized a deferred prosecution agreement. Court documents were signed on October 23, 2026, according to reporting by Becker's Hospital Review and Virginia Business. Under the agreement, the hospital will pay about $19.2 million in total. In a deferred prosecution agreement the government pauses the criminal case, agrees to drop the charges if the hospital meets every condition over a set term, and keeps the right to proceed if it does not.

The money splits into two parts. The hospital will establish a $12,836,916 fund to compensate patients, reported as covering more than 1,000 victims. It will separately pay $6,418,458 in restitution to federal and state health care programs, reported to include Medicare, Medicaid, and Tricare, for the surgical and obstetric procedures that were billed. According to WTKR, which reviewed the filing, the patient fund figure is $12,836,916 and the program restitution is split into $3,308,502 for surgical procedures and $3,109,956 for obstetric procedures.

The hospital did not simply pay and move on. In the agreement it accepted responsibility and admitted its role in Perwaiz's crimes, as set out in an accompanying Statement of Facts. A hospital spokesperson said Chesapeake Regional must "reflect on and take responsibility for our organization's role in the past" and expressed "sorrow to the women and families impacted by these events." The agreement runs for a two-year term and requires the hospital to retain an independent compliance monitor and to tighten physician oversight, patient consent, medical necessity review, and internal reporting. An earlier statement had called the January 2025 indictment an "excessive overreach," so the admission is a notable change in position.

Dr. Javaid Perwaiz is a former obstetrician-gynecologist who practiced in Hampton Roads, Virginia, since the 1980s. In November 2020, a federal jury in Norfolk convicted him on 52 counts of health care fraud and false statements. In May 2021 a federal judge sentenced him to 59 years in prison and ordered him to pay restitution of about $18.5 million. His lawyers said at sentencing that he maintains his innocence. The conviction is a finding of a jury, not an allegation.

According to the Department of Justice and evidence presented at trial, Perwaiz ran a scheme between at least 2010 and 2019 to bill private and government insurers for irreversible hysterectomies and other surgeries and procedures that were not medically necessary. Prosecutors said that in many cases he falsely told patients they needed surgery to avoid cancer in order to persuade them to agree. Dozens of former patients testified, some about complications they still live with.

The trial evidence went beyond unnecessary surgery. Prosecutors said Perwaiz falsified records for obstetric patients so he could induce labor early, before the gestational age that minimizes risk to mother and baby, so he could perform and bill for the deliveries. They said he violated the 30-day waiting period that Medicaid requires for elective sterilizations by submitting backdated forms, and that he billed insurers hundreds of thousands of dollars for diagnostic procedures he only pretended to perform. The then-U.S. Attorney, G. Zachary Terwilliger, said Perwaiz "preyed upon his trusting patients" and noted he had a history of fraud, including having his medical license and hospital privileges revoked in the past.

Alongside the criminal case, former patients have been suing the hospital in civil court. According to court filings and reporting, the civil litigation began in December 2025 and has grown to more than 1,000 plaintiffs, with one filing describing more than 1,040. The suits allege that Chesapeake Regional and its former leaders allowed Perwaiz to perform unnecessary procedures for years despite warnings. These are allegations; a lawsuit is a claim, not a finding, and the hospital's civil liability to any individual patient has not been decided.

The central legal battle in the civil cases is about timing. Perwaiz's surgeries ran from 2010 to 2019, and Virginia's deadline for most medical malpractice claims is short. The hospital has argued that the women waited too long to sue. The law firm representing more than 1,000 of the women, the DiPietro Law Firm, has responded that the hospital cannot credibly claim to accept responsibility while trying to have the civil suits thrown out on timing grounds, and that the women "had no idea" the hospital was involved until it was indicted in January 2025.

That disagreement is not a technicality. It is the question that will decide whether many of these claims can go forward at all. Virginia law does contain an extension for cases where fraud, concealment, or intentional misrepresentation kept an injury hidden, which is exactly the argument the patients are making. How that rule applies depends on the specific facts of each patient's case and when that patient reasonably could have discovered the hospital's role. This is why two patients who had the same surgery in the same year can end up with very different answers about whether they can still sue.

A criminal conviction, a government investigation, and a civil claim are three different things. Perwaiz's conviction establishes that he committed fraud. The hospital's admission in the deferred prosecution agreement establishes that it accepts a role in what happened. Neither one automatically proves that a particular patient is owed money or that a particular surgery was unnecessary for that patient. A civil claim still has to connect specific conduct to a specific injury, usually with expert medical review of the records.

What the public record does is make the questions worth asking and point to where the answers live. The Statement of Facts, the credentialing files, the peer-review history, and the surgical and billing records become evidence that can show whether the failures were known, systemic, and preventable rather than a one-off. Our article on surgical errors, including wrong-site surgery, retained objects, and post-operative failures, explains why unnecessary surgery is treated as a classic malpractice pattern, and our overview of what medical malpractice actually is walks through the four elements a claim has to prove.

If you or a loved one was a surgical or obstetric patient of Perwaiz at Chesapeake Regional, there are now two possible paths, the compensation fund and a civil claim, and they do not foreclose each other. If you already have a lawyer in the existing litigation, direct these questions to that lawyer. If you do not, a free review can tell you where you stand and which deadlines apply to you.

Start preserving the paper and electronic trail. Federal law gives patients and their representatives the right to inspect and copy the medical record, so request your complete chart in writing: operative reports, pathology results, consent forms, the anesthesia and obstetric records, and the billing records showing what was submitted to your insurer. Pathology reports matter a great deal in unnecessary-surgery cases, because they can show whether tissue that was removed showed the disease that supposedly justified the operation.

Much of what decides these cases lives in records beyond the printed chart: the hospital's credentialing and peer-review files, the dates privileges were renewed, and the internal reports that captured staff complaints. Some of that is already part of the public record through the Statement of Facts. Our article on EMR audit trails and what electronic records actually reveal explains how the hidden metadata layer of a modern chart can establish who knew what and when.

Write down your own account while it is clear: when you were treated, what you were told you needed and why, what symptoms or diagnosis were used to justify the surgery, and the complications you have had since. If a loved one has died, do not assume the cause recorded at the time is the last word.