A Virginia hospital is facing federal criminal charges over what prosecutors say was an extended scheme to profit from a high-billing doctor’s troubling practices, including dozens of medically unnecessary surgeries performed on unsuspecting women, which left some of them sterile.

An indictment filed Wednesday in federal district court in Norfolk charges the hospital, Chesapeake Regional Healthcare, with health care fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States. The hospital collected about $18.5 million in reimbursements from private insurers, Medicare and Medicaid for questionable procedures performed between 2010 and 2019 by Javaid Perwaiz, prosecutors say. The obstetrician-gynecologist was sentenced to 59 years in prison for abusing female patients with unnecessary surgeries to enrich himself with insurance payouts.