A settlement has been reached in a whistleblower class action lawsuit brought against DaVita Healthcare Partners Inc who is accused of paying kickbacks to induce the referral of patients to its dialysis clinics.
DaVita has agreed to pay $350 million to settle the claims brought against them. The Company has also agreed to a civil forfeiture in the amount of $39 million.
Filed in 2009, the whistleblower case alleged that DaVita used a three part joint venture business model to induce patient referrals. The accusation of the three part model was broken down as follows; 1) identify physicians or physician groups that had a significant number of patients suffering from renal disease, 2) to offer the targeted physicians or physician groups lucrative opportunities to partner with DaVita by acquiring or selling an interest in dialysis clinics to which their patients would be referred for dialysis treatment, and 3) to ensure referrals of these patients through a series of secondary agreements with the physician partners in which the physicians agreed not to compete with the DaVita clinics and prohibited the physician partners from referring patients to competing dialysis clinics.
