A Medical Device Daily

Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp; Burlington, North Carolina), a medical testing provider, said this week that it has received a federal subpoena seeking documents related to capitation and risk sharing arrangements with the government and private insurers.

In a regulatory filing, the company said the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Jersey had told the company that it was not a target of the investigation, which seeks documents from 1993 to 1999.

LabCorp’s report on the subpoena follows the recent announcement by Quest Diagnostics (Teterboro, New Jersey) that it too had received a government subpoena for the same kind of documents.

In other legalities, CRF (Waltham, Massachusetts) issued a press statement terming as “misleading” a recent statement by competitor PHT – that release claiming an “important victory” in the companies’ patent dispute (MDD, June 2, 2005).

CRF, billing itself as “the world leader in electronic patient-reported outcomes (e-PRO)” – said that PHT “simply ignores substantial problems regarding the validity of PHT’s patent and the fact that the court, in the Markman decision, made no findings on the issues of infringement or invalidity.”

“There are many e-diary prior art references that were not disclosed to the Patent and Trademark Office that provide a very strong case that the claims at issue in the PHT lawsuit are invalid,” said Pamela McNamara, president and CEO of CRF. “This is a position consistently taken by others in the market. We continue to believe that the lawsuit filed by PHT against not only CRF, but other major participants in the market, invivodata [Pittsburgh] and etrials [Morrisville, North Carolina], is a bad-faith attempt to influence the market while the case is pending . . . We see PHT’s press release as a continuation of this conduct.”

In the case, PHT claims that its patent covers a broad range of e-diary technology, with CRF claiming that e-diaries “were well-known to the public at the time its patent was filed in 1995.”

CRF said also that the claim construction conducted by a Delaware district court judge “is part of the normal patent litigation process that occurs in all patent cases. The court made no findings against either party on the issues of infringement or invalidity.”