BATON ROUGE - A nationwide home health firm has agreed to pay $43.8 million to settle a lawsuit by investors who claim it used Medicare fraud to inflate its bottom line.

  

Shareholders filed the federal lawsuit in 2010 against Amedisys Inc. of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and some senior executives.

  

Amedisys agreed in 2014 to pay $150 million to settle a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit accusing it of billing Medicare between 2008 and 2010 for services that weren't needed or were provided to patients who could have been treated at doctors' offices.

  

The Advocate and Baton Rouge Business Report note that neither settlement concedes any liability. The company says it's settling to avoid "uncertainties, risk, distraction and expense associated with this protracted litigation."