The University of California paid a $10 million settlement to the former chairman of UCLA’s orthopedic surgery department Tuesday, after he alleged the school’s doctors took lucrative payments from medical companies without reporting them and subsequently compromised patient care, among other allegations.
In 2012, Robert Pedowitz, a former UCLA orthopedic surgeon, sued UCLA, the UC Board of Regents and six UCLA doctors, accusing university doctors of failing to disclose conflicts of interest in their work. He claimed several doctors were receiving large payments from certain medical companies, and that these financial ties influenced the doctors’ patient care.
“There’s nothing wrong with the doctors receiving payments from the outside companies, but when they do they have to disclose it and they have to deposit that money into the Department of Orthopedic Surgery compensation plan,” said Mark Quigley, Pedowitz’s attorney. “Dr. Pedowitz discovered that money was being paid by some of the companies but the doctors weren’t disclosing it.”
Quigley said Pedowitz alleged that one faculty member, for instance, only used products from a company with which he had financial ties.
Such conflicts of interest can also affect patients if, for example, a doctor receiving large payments from a medical company recommends that company’s product to patients without notifying them of his or her financial ties to that group, Quigley said.
After reporting his concerns to his superiors, Pedowitz said in a lawsuit that he was told at the end of the 2009-10 academic year that he would be fired from his position as department chairman unless he resigned. He said he believed this was retaliation for voicing his concerns about the department.
“I discovered behavior that I thought was very disconcerting. I thought I was doing the right thing by enforcing policy, and I thought I was doing the job that was required of me as the department chair,” Pedowitz said in an interview with the Daily Bruin Wednesday.
“I was very disappointed that I didn’t get sufficient backup from the people that I reported to for doing what I thought was my job.”
After he stepped down from his position as department chairman, Quigley said Pedowitz received few patient referrals compared to other doctors. Quigley said he received six patient referrals over the span of 27 months compared to the more than a hundred other doctors received. In addition, Pedowitz was not assigned to provide medical attention to a UCLA sports team, as is typical for orthopedic doctors, Quigley added.
Pedowitz later filed a claim alleging university employees retaliated against him for voicing his concerns, but said the university told him the claim had no merit.
“Multiple investigations by university officials and independent investigators concluded that conduct by faculty members was lawful,” the statement read. “Patient care was not compromised.”
In a statement on a UCLA website, the university claimed that UCLA fully abided by the law and UC policy.
On Tuesday, the day the case’s parties were set to deliver closing arguments, Pedowitz reached a settlement agreement with the University for $10 million.
According to a university statement, the UC Regents paid the settlement “to end a prolonged conflict and permit UCLA Health Sciences to refocus on its primary missions of teaching, research, patient care and community engagement.”
UCLA added that the university has been improving its compliance policies and procedures in the past few years, including hiring a chief compliance officer and growing its compliance review team.