The lawsuit charges that IU Health and HealthNet Inc. put low-income pregnant women and their newborn babies at risk in a fraud scheme that bilked taxpayers out of millions of dollars.
HealthNet Inc., a system of not-for-profit health centers in Marion County, has named Ricardo Diaz chief operating officer, effective Aug. 19. For the past seven years, Diaz worked as chief operations officer for Southern Illinois Healthcare Foundation. Diaz is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He holds a bachelor’s degree in health care administration from American Intercontinental University and a master’s degree in business administration from Ashford University.
Pearl Pathways recently hired Mark Killion as business development director. The Indiana University graduate has been a salesman for various companies, including Actavis Inc., Acorda Therapeutics and Savient Pharmaceuticals.
Indianapolis-based medical research organization Regenstrief Institute Inc. named Thane Peterson executive operating officer. Peterson has served since 2006 as senior director for contracts and compliance at Iowa-based Telligen, a population health management organization. He previously served as director of the office of sponsored programs administration for Iowa State University. Peterson holds a bachelor’s degree in business finance from Iowa State and a master’s of public administration from Drake University.
Two new health clinics opened on the west side of Indianapolis last week. HealthNet Inc. opened a community health center on West 10th Street, providing primary, pediatric and OB/GYN care, as well as optomemtry, podiatry, behavioral health and social work services. Also, Community Health Network opened a medical office building in Speedway, which is part of its westward expansion after its acquisition of Westview Hospital on West 38th Street. The offices offer primary care, walk-in care, imaging, infusion therapy and occupational health services. Community also will work with the new Marian University College of Osteopathic Medicine to conduct training for medical residents in Speedway.
WellPoint Inc. is still considering former Amerigroup Corp. CEO James Carlson among several finalists to become CEO, Bloomberg News reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. The Indianapolis-based health insurer has delayed defining a role for Carlson, who joined WellPoint through its $4.9 billion acquisition of Amerigroup in December, because he is a contender for the top position, said the person, who asked for anonymity because the information is private. Retired Aetna Inc. CEO Ronald Williams also has been a leading candidate, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations. Carlson, 60, would replace Angela Braly, who was forced out in August amid investor complaints about the company's performance. Carlson built Amerigroup into one of the biggest insurers focused on the growing Medicaid sector. In an e-mail, Kristin Binns, a WellPoint spokeswoman, said the company wouldn’t comment on the CEO search. Maureen McDonnell, an Amerigroup spokeswoman, also declined to discuss the process or Carlson’s role. Katherine Mentus, a spokesman for Williams, declined to comment when reached by telephone. Analysts expect WellPoint to make a decision by the end of February.
Eli Lilly and Co. will have to conduct more studies of its experimental Alzheimer’s drug, but it is getting some outside help. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston chose Lilly’s drug solanezumab for a large federally funded study testing whether it's possible to prevent Alzheimer's disease in older people at high risk of developing it, according to the Associated Press. Lilly’s own studies of solanezumab found that it did not help people with moderate to severe Alzheimer's, but it showed some promise against milder disease. Researchers think it might work better if given before symptoms start. The new study will enroll 1,000 patients between age 70 and 85 who show a buildup of plaques in their brains but do not yet show signs of Alzheimer’s, including loss of memory and ability to do daily activities. Lilly’s solanezumab is also one of two drugs being studied in Alzheimer’s patients by researchers at Washington University. The other is made by the Genentech unit of Switzerland-based Roche Holding AG.
Indianapolis-based Defender Direct, a home security dealer, has opened an on-site health clinic, joining a number of other area employers that offer such services. Defender Direct’s 650 employees and their families now can receive primary care at the East 96th Street clinic, operated by Indianapolis-based OurHealth. Indianapolis-based MJ Insurance, which has helped such employers as Interactive Intelligence Inc. and others set up onsite clinics, brokered the deal.
Roche Diagnostics Corp. in Indianapolis ranks 89th on Fortune magazine’s latest annual list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For,” the magazine announced Thursday. In selecting Roche, the only Indiana company to appear on the list, Fortune cited its on-site medical clinic and fitness center, the company's $30,000 budget for intramural sports, and its health insurance plans tiered to income levels. The Indianapolis campus serves as the North American headquarters for the diagnostics business of Switzerland-based Roche Holding AG.
Eli Lilly and Co. shares rose nearly 5 percent Monday morning after the company said a study found that its experimental stomach cancer drug helped patients with advanced disease live longer, according to Bloomberg News. The drug, ramucirumab was tested in patients with gastric cancer that had spread to other organs. The most common side effect for the medicine was high blood pressure, diarrhea and headache, Lilly said in a prepared statement. Lilly did not disclose how much logner ramucirumab helped patients live, but said it would release those details at a future medical meeting. If approved, the drug might generate $600 million in annual sales, said Mark Schoenebaum, a New York-based analyst with ISI Group. Lilly shares rose 4.8 percent, to $52.86 each, late in the morning and were up 32 percent in the 12 months through Sunday. Ramucirumab is among the products obtained by Lilly from its $6.5 billion acquisition of ImClone Systems Inc. in 2008. Lilly has five other late-stage studies of ramucirumab ongoing in four tumor types, including breast and lung cancer. If approved for all indications in testing, the drug could have $1.6 billion in sales by 2020, according to a prediction by Leerink Swann analyst Seamus Fernandez.
Ron Thieme, who took over as president and CEO of AIT Laboratories during a management shakeup earlier this year, is leaving, the Indianapolis-based firm announced Monday morning. Chairman and company founder Michael Evans will return to the positions of president and CEO. Evans stepped down from those positions in March to make way for Thieme, who had been vice president and chief information officer of AIT since 2007. AIT said Monday in a prepared statement that Thieme was “leaving the company to pursue other challenges” and “would continue to work with AIT during a transition period.” AIT, a forensics and clinical testing company, has experienced a number of management moves this year amid challenging economic conditions in its industry. In January, Evans said AIT was looking to "restructure our business" and had eliminated an unspecified number of jobs. “AIT has seen reimbursement from government and private payers reduced throughout 2011, which has had a negative financial impact on the company,” he said at the time.
Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc. will reorganize into four business units as a way to smooth the integration of Amerigroup Corp., the insurer WellPoint agreed to buy in July for $4.9 billion, according to a company memo obtained by Bloomberg News. Unlike WellPoint’s old structure, Medicare and Medicaid plans will be handled in separate divisions. In addition, there will be a commercial division overseeing sales of health insurance to employers and individuals, and a specialty division that sells dental, vision and disability coverage. Jim Carlson, CEO of Virginia-based Amerigroup, will run the Medicare division. Leeba Lessin, who was the top medical officer at California-based CareMore Group when WellPoint acquired it last year, will run the Medicare unit. Ken Goulet will continue to oversee WellPoint’s commercial business. And WellPoint veteran Lori Beer will oversee the specialty businesses. Chief Financial Officer Wayne DeVeydt will remain in his job. The changes were instituted by John Cannon, who has been serving as WellPoint’s interim CEO since the forced resignation of Angela Braly on Aug. 28. Cannon will serve in that role until a permanent replacement is found.
Three health care organizations broke ground on new facilities last week. The Community Health Network hospital system will construct a $24 million cancer center on the campus of its Community South Hospital. The 65,000-square-foot facility is expected to open next fall. Wishard Health Services, which is in the process of changing its name to Eskenazi Health, is building a $25 million primary care center in a former Circuit City store near Lafayette Square Mall. The 70,000-square-foot center will open next fall to provide care, senior care, health and wellness programs, physical therapy, radiology and other diagnostic testing. In addition, HealthNet Inc. is spending $312,000 to convert a former Blockbuster video store on West 10th Street into a primary care health center. The center will also offer pediatric, OB/GYN, podiatry, optometry, social work and behavioral health services, as well as access to discounted prescriptions. The health center, which will open in December, is expected to serve 3,000 patients.
Biomet Inc. saw its operating income fall and its sales growth decelerate in the three months ended Aug. 31. The Warsaw-based maker of orthopedic implants is often a bellwether for the rest of the industry. Biomet’s overall sales rose 6 percent in the quarter, to $707.4 million, compared with the same three months a year ago. But excluding Biomet’s recent acquisition of a trauma implant maker, its sales would have grown just 1 percent, to $668.6 million, over the same quarter last year. During the three months ended May 31, Biomet’s overall sales grew 3 percent. “We did experience some deceleration in growth for our hip and knee business, but until others report their results, we won't know whether market growth has slowed or our growth has come back to market,” Biomet CEO Jeffrey Binder said in a prepared statement. Operating income at Biomet totaled $69 million during the most recent quarter, down from nearly $73 million during the same quarter last year. Excluding special costs related to Biomet’s 2007 buyout by private equity firms and its acquisition of the trauma company, Biomet would have generated operating income of $191.7 million, a 5-percent increase over the same quarter last year.
Investors gave a cheer to WellPoint Inc.’s $4.9 billion deal to acquire Amerigroup Corp., a Virginia-based Medicaid managed care company. Shares of the Indianapolis-based health insurer shot up more than 5 percent in pre-market trading Monday and were still up 3 percent after 1 p.m. even as the broader markets fell slightly. Investors and analysts like the fact that WellPoint is playing more aggressively in government-sponsored health plans, such as Medicaid and Medicare, which are projected to be the areas for growth the next several years. “This acquisition aligns WellPoint much better with where the market is heading in terms of customers and markets,” Credit Suisse analyst Charles Boorady said during a conference call Monday morning. The deal will bring WellPoint more than 2.6 million Medicaid members in 12 states—more than doubling the 1.9 Medicaid members the company now manages. The combined companies would be the largest provider of Medicaid managed care in the nation. Medicaid is a health insurance program for the poor funded jointly by states and the federal government. Along with the federal Medicare program for seniors, it is expected to be a key driver of growth for health insurers over the next few years.
Meadows Community Foundation will develop a 70,000-square-foot Health & Wellness Center in the Avondale Meadows Community on Indianapolis’ northeast side. The nearly $20 million facility is part of a 100-acre neighborhood revitalization within the Meadows area, financed in part by a group started by superstar investor Warren Buffet. The new center will include an 18,000-square-foot health clinic operated by Indianapolis-based HealthNet Inc. and a 32,000-square-foot outpost of the YMCA. The center will provide early-learning classrooms for children, as well as youth mentoring and family programs.
Andrew Saykin, director of the Indiana University Center for Neuroimaging, is serving as principal investigator for a new nationwide research project to understand the genetics of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers will sequence the genomes of more than 800 older adults who are currently part of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, an 8-year-old project to find biological markers that indicate when Alzheimer’s is developing. The National Cell Repository for Alzheimer's Disease at the Indiana University School of Medicine will serve as the storage site for the DNA samples collected around the country for the initiative. “This is the equivalent of going from a good quality map of the United States to having the detailed blueprints for everything within our borders,” Saykin said in a statement.
Eli Lilly and Co. received an extra six months of marketing exclusivity in the United States for its antidepressant Cymbalta, its biggest-selling drug. The Indianapolis-based drugmaker said marketing exclusivity on Cymbalta will now expire in December 2013, which means cheaper generic copies of the drug will not be approved until then. The extension likely will give Lilly an extra $2 billion in sales, according to the Associated Press. The drugmaker said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had determined that Cymbalta meets requirements for a pediatric exclusivity extension even though Cymbalta is not approved for use in children. U.S. sales of Cymbalta totaled $1.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012. That was about three-quarters of all worldwide sales of the drug.
Erbitux, a cancer treatment made by Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co.'s Imclone unit, failed to help patients with advanced stomach tumors in a late-stage clinical trial, according to the company that markets the drug overseas. Erbitux, when combined with two other medicines, didn’t extend the length of time that patients lived without their disease getting worse, said Germany-based Merck KGaA. Lilly and New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. market Erbitux in the United States and Canada, while Merck promotes it in all other markets. According to Bloomberg News, Lilly realized total revenue of $409 million from Erbitux in 2011.
A major lender to Arcadia Resources Inc. has moved to foreclose on the struggling Indianapolis-based business, which in turn agreed to cease operations. Arcadia reported the foreclosure agreement with Dallas-based Comerica Bank, which Arcadia owed $11 million, in a May 3 filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The closing represents the probable final fall for the once-promising health care company. Just two years ago, the company announced a huge expansion that it expected would add 930 jobs in Indiana by 2013. In order to satisfy a debt to one of its suppliers, Arcadia completed the sale of its DailyMed pharmacy business in February to a subsidiary of Illinois-based Walgreen Co. for just $2 million. That left Arcadia with its home health care and medical staffing businesses, which were being funded by an $11 million line of credit from Comerica. Arcadia already had drawn on the entire line of credit, which came due on April 30. The company owed about $30 million to three private equity firms that likely will not be repaid. The company had less than $1 million in assets, according to the SEC filing. In the nine months ended Dec. 31, Arcadia had $61.5 million in revenue and posted a loss of $13.5 million.
Eli Lilly and Co., Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca plc will contribute two dozen failed compounds to launch a new $20 million program in which government-sponsored scientists will see if the compounds show promise against other diseases than the ones for which they were first tested. If they do, it could help the drugmakers, which will still own the compounds, to bring them to market faster. The academic researchers would share in the profits of any drugs that make it to market. The program, kicked off May 3 by the National Institutes of Health, hopes to add more compounds soon. “It’s an opportunity to get more value out of our molecules,” said Jan Lundberg, president of Lilly Research Laboratories in Indianapolis. “Instead of parking them, we can let the academic community and NIH continue the testing to see if they have a significant benefit that we actually don’t know of today.”
A researcher at the Indiana University School of Medicine got national attention for his study suggesting that Tasers wielded by police can induce fatal heart attacks. Dr. Doulas Zipes, an emeritus professor of cardiology at the IU med school, found that in eight healthy men who became unconscious after being stunned by a Taser, six developed abnormal heart rhythms. All eight of the men, who ranged in age from 16 to 48, lost consciousness after receiving the shock; seven of them died. “This study doesn’t say that we should abandon using Taser devices, but it does show that users should exercise caution, avoid chest shocks and monitor the person after shock to ensure there are no adverse reactions,” Zipes said after his study was published in the journal Circulation. The results of Zipes' study were covered by USA Today, the New York Times and CBS News. A spokesman for Arizona-based Taser International Inc. told USA Today that the small number of cases in Zipes' study are not enough to draw broad conclusions. "There have been 3 million uses of Taser devices worldwide, with this case series reporting eight of concern," said Steve Tuttle, who also noted that Zipes has testified against Taser as an expert witness in legal cases brought against the company. "This article does not support a cause-effect association and fails to accurately evaluate the risks versus the benefits of the thousands of lives saved by police with Taser devices," Tuttle told the newspaper.
Authorities have made arrests in the 2010 theft of about $80 million in Eli Lilly and Co. prescription drugs from a Connecticut warehouse, according to the Associated Press. Two Cuban brothers were arrested in Florida and charged with helping steal the pharmaceuticals, including Lilly’s drugs Prozac and Zyprexa. The thieves broke into the Enfield warehouse of Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant Lilly in March 2010 and stole enough pills to fill a tractor-trailer. The drugs were believed to be destined for the black market, perhaps overseas. After cutting a hole in the roof of the industrial park warehouse, they lowered themselves to the floor, disabled the alarms and spent at least an hour loading pallets of antidepressants and other drugs into a vehicle at the loading dock, authorities said. Lilly plans to destroy the medicines once they are no longer needed as evidence.
Indianapolis-based HealthNet Inc. received a $155,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services to renovate its Fountain Square facility to accommodate 1,150 more patient visits each year. HealthNet will use the money to turn a office space and a medical records storage area into three patient exam rooms. The center already handles more than 35,000 patient visits each year. The money is part of a series of grants to community health centers across the country. The funds were made available as part of the 2010 Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act. HealthNet operates 10 community health centers in the Indianapolis area.
Danville-based Hendricks Regional Health announced that Dr. John Sparzo will become the hospital system’s interim CEO on June 1 after current CEO Dennis Dawes retires. Sparzo is Hendricks Regional’s vice president for medical affairs. Hendricks Regional has hired an executive search firm to conduct a national hunt for a permanent replacement for Dawes, who has led Hendricks Regional for 38 years.
Fuad Hammoudeh has joined St.Vincent Cancer Care as executive director. He has been Indiana University Health’s administrator of cancer programs since 2005. Before that, he was CEO of the University of Tennessee Cancer Institute. And from 1986 to 1994, Hammoudeh was CEO of Hancock Regional Hospital in Greenfield. He holds a bachelor’s in political science from Manchester College and a bachelor’s in accounting from St. Joseph College.
The Indiana University National Center of Excellence in Women's Health named Teri Duell to a newly created position of operations director. Duell previously worked in the office of gift development at the IU School of Medicine. Also, IU named Tisha Reid the associate director of the IU National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health. Reid previously worked as the outreach manager of the Indiana Clinical Translational Sciences Institute’s Community Health Engagement Program.
Indianapolis-based HealthNet Inc., a not-for-profit network of Indiana health care centers, named J. Cornelius “Jimmy” Brown its new CEO. He will succeed Booker Thomas, who is retiring June 11 after more than 12 years leading HealthNet. Brown most recently served as vice president of corporate services and community affairs at Swope Health Services in Kansas City, Mo. Previously, he was president and CEO at Dallas Southwest Medical Center in Texas. Brown retired as a lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Air Force in 1992. He holds a master’s degree in public administration, with an emphasis in health care management, from the University of North Dakota. He earned a bachelor’s in public administration from North Texas State University.
The Indianapolis-based not-for-profit network of health care centers said J. Cornelius Brown, who arrives from Swope Health Services in Kansas City, Mo., will replace the retiring Booker Thomas.
HealthNet Inc. CEO Booker Thomas has announced plans to retire in July 2012. Thomas, 69, has led HealthNet’s chain of community health centers since 1999. During his tenure, the not-for-profit has grown from five locations and an annual budget of $13 million to nine neighborhood clinics, nine school-based clinics and a budget of $45 million. The number of patients served has more than doubled to 50,000 a year. HealthNet has formed a committee to search for a replacement for Thomas.
HealthNet said it will use the funds to expand and renovate two community health centers that have outgrown their space.
