by Ben Vernia | September 15th, 2014
On September 8, the Department of Justice announced that it was filing two complaints in Michigan, intervening in two physician whistleblowers’ lawsuit against several health care providers for paying or receiving kickbacks for devices used in spinal surgery. According to DOJ’s press release:
The United States has filed two complaints under the False Claims Act against Michigan neurosurgeon Dr. Aria Sabit, spinal implant company Reliance Medical Systems, two Reliance distributorships—Apex Medical Technologies and Kronos Spinal Technologies—and the companies’ owners, Brett Berry, John Hoffman and Adam Pike, the Justice Department announced today. The complaints allege that Apex Medical and Kronos Spinal paid physicians, including Sabit, to induce them to use Reliance spinal implants in the surgeries they performed.
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Berry and Pike founded Reliance in 2006, and subsequently created more than 12 physician-owned distributorships that sold Reliance devices. Each of Reliance’s distributorships sold spinal implants ordered by their physician-owners for use in procedures the physician-owners performed on their own patients. The complaints allege that Reliance used one of its distributorships, Apex Medical, to funnel improper payments to Sabit for using Reliance spinal implants in his surgeries. According to the complaints, Sabit began using Reliance implants on his patients only after he acquired an ownership interest in Apex and started receiving payments from the sale of Reliance’s spinal implants. Apex allegedly paid Sabit $438,570 between May 2010 and July 2012, during which time Sabit used Reliance implants in approximately 90 percent of his spinal fusion surgeries. The government also alleges that these payments caused Sabit to perform medically unnecessary or excessive surgeries on certain patients who did not need the spinal implants.
The government further alleges that Reliance operated a second distributor, Kronos, in southern California, which made improper payments to two other physicians, Drs. Ali Mesiwala and Gowriharan Thaiyananthan. Allegedly, Reliance’s owners were recorded telling a potential Kronos investor that Reliance was formed as part of a plan to “get around” the federal Anti-Kickback Statute, which prohibits such improper payments, and that Reliance pays its physician-investors enough in the first month or two to “put their kids through college.”
