Pharmaceutical manufacturers frequently compensate physicians and other health care professionals to provide training for other prescribers, often at dinner speaker programs. But what might happen if you were paid to speak about a drug to other prescribers and the only other person there to hear you speak was a company sales representative? What if the audience consisted of office staff and friends, none of whom held licenses to prescribe the drug? And what about the situation where the training did not include any presentation about the drug?
That’s exactly the scenario described in the recent federal guilty plea by Heather Alfonso, an advanced practice registered nurse (APRN) licensed to prescribe drugs in Connecticut. In June, Alfonso pled guilty to federal charges for receiving kickbacks disguised as payments for sham speaker programs from Insys Therapeutics. Insys is a manufacturer of the pain medication Subsys, a form of fentanyl that is sprayed under the tongue. Not long after, in August, Insys settled the first of many investigations pending against it by agreeing to pay the Oregon attorney general’s office $1.1 million to resolve allegations it paid kickbacks and engaged in deceptive marketing to Oregon doctors.
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