Lab Pays $4M to Settle Doctor-Kickback Claims
By Bianca Bruno,
Courthouse News Service
| 12. 30. 2015
Untitled DocumentA San Diego-based medical diagnostics laboratory paid over $4 million to settle claims it gave kickbacks to physicians who referred patients to the company for genetic testing.
Pathway Genomics Corporation paid $4,036,622.74 in a civil settlement of claims it paid doctors in exchange for patient referrals for their genetic testing kits that analyze the risks for certain genetic cancers and diseases and test the responsiveness of certain medications. The tests are performed using a saliva sample that is typically collected by a patient's doctor and mailed to Pathway's lab for testing.
Federal investigators found Pathway violated the False Claims Act by offering physicians and medical groups reimbursements of up to $20 for each saliva kit they submitted for genetic testing. Individual physicians cashed in as much as $13,534 in kickbacks from Pathway and most had not ordered the costly genetic tests prior to enrolling in the reimbursement program, according to U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy.
Prosecutors also claimed Pathway billed federal health care programs such as Medicare and TRICARE to foot the cost of the testing.
Pathway has since...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Deni Ellis Béchard, The Washington Post | 10.07.2025
In 1949, when John Gurdon was a 16-year-old boarding school student at Eton College in England, his teacher described his biology studies as “disastrous” and his scientific ambitions as “ridiculous.”
“If he can’t learn simple biological facts,” his term report...