Class Action: AmerisourceBergen Paid Neurologist to Prescribe Unnecessary IVIG Treatments

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A West Virginia woman has filed suit against the entities that make up AmerisourceBergen Specialty Group over claims that they made illegal payments to her doctor in order to sell expensive and unnecessary immunoglobulin (IVIG) treatments.

The proposed class action alleges that the defendants made payments to West Virginia neurologist Felix Brizuela, D.O. approximately every quarter between April 2012 and March 2015 in order to induce him to misdiagnose patients and prescribe the companies’ product. IVIG is a blood product containing immunoglobulins from human plasma that is administered intravenously to treat chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIPD), the case explains.

Non-party Brizuela, the lawsuit says, became one of the highest volume prescribers of IVIG in the years following April 2012, and was responsible for 65 new IVIG accounts for the defendants. The rate at which the doctor was making CIPD diagnoses was “exponentially higher” than any rates published in peer review studies and did not match the rates of other prescribers, the suit alleges, suggesting that the man was influenced by AmerisourceBergen’s unlawful payments.

According to the lawsuit, the defendants “greatly incentivized the aggressive sales of IVIG” because they possessed knowledge that the treatment, once prescribed, is usually administered throughout the rest of the patient’s life. Moreover, the treatment is very expensive for the purchaser, which the case points out makes it very lucrative for the defendants. Underlying all this, the lawsuit goes on, is a scheme devised by the defendants by which the healthcare conglomerate under-reported IVIG sales and underpaid related bonus commissions. Nevertheless, the case says, some of the defendants’ sales executives earned quarterly IVIG bonuses in excess of $900,000.00.

Even after charging initially exorbitant prices for IVIG infusions, the defendants, the suit alleges, continuously raised the prices of the treatment in order to further line their pockets. For example, the case says, the plaintiff received an infusion roughly every two weeks that initially cost $8,758.29 per infusion but increased to $10,450.44 over the next 12 months.

Worse, the plaintiff alleges that she and other patients did not even have CIPD but were prescribed the expensive IVIG treatment anyway as a result of the defendants’ payments to their doctor.