Two decisions from the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas limit the extent to which relators can stretch the use of circumstantial evidence to support a False Claims Act case based on an anti-kickback or off-label marketing theory. In two separate decisions on December 10 and December 14 in US ex rel. King v. Solvay Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (SPI)., the court granted SPI’s summary judgment motion finding insufficient evidence for a reasonable juror to support either theory.

For the anti-kickback claim, relators alleged that SPI engaged in a number of activities, such as speaker programs, preceptorships, honorariums, free continuing medical education, and provided gifts such as dinners and event tickets, as part of a national scheme to illegally induce physicians to prescribe SPI’s drugs. In dismissing this claim on December 10, the court first found that the allegations of a nationwide scheme were unsupported because in relator’s response to interrogatories and expert report, only 46 Texas-based physicians were identified as having prescribed SPI’s drugs and as having allegedly received remuneration from SPI. The court observed:

[t]heoretically Relators could survive summary judgment with examples, the examples would have to be linked to remuneration from SPI, some evidence of intent that the remuneration would lead to claims, and claims for prescriptions written by these physicians that a reasonable juror could believe resulted from the unlawful remuneration.  Additionally, to continue a claim on a national-level scheme, Relators would need to demonstrate that kickbacks were provided to physicians in different areas of the country as part of a nationwide scheme to increase prescriptions of the specific Drugs at Issue to patients who are on Medicaid or part of some other government prescription program.

Since relators provided no physician examples outside of Texas, the court ruled the multi-state claims failed.

The court then examined each of the alleged forms of remuneration and found that the evidence was insufficient to find SPI had the requisite “knowing and willful” intent to induce referrals to support an anti-kickback claim under federal or Texas law. For example, the “physician profile interview program” involved sales representatives interviewing physicians prior to the launch of the drug Aceon to obtain information about the physicians’ practice and treatment of hypertension. Physicians were paid $100 for participating in this 30 minute interview. Sales reps were instructed to not mention Aceon during these interviews. Relators offered no evidence that sales reps failed to follow this instruction. Not surprisingly, the court found that the evidence failed to show that SPI intended the program to induce physicians to write prescriptions for a drug they were not told about. For other forms of remuneration, the court found that relators offered no proof that the physicians who received the remuneration actually prescribed SPI’s drugs.

In a separate ruling on December 14, the court granted SPI’s summary judgment motion dismissing relators’ “fraud-on-DrugDex” theory. To be eligible for government reimbursement for an off-label use of a drug, relators alleged that off-label use has to be [...]

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