Fake Therapist Fooled Hundreds; Jail Doc Discipline; FDA Lobbying Workarounds

Welcome to the latest edition of Investigative Roundup, highlighting some of the best investigative reporting on healthcare each week.

Fake Online Therapist Fooled Hundreds of Patients

Hundreds of patients appeared to have received therapy from an unqualified, untrained individual through an online therapy platform, potentially for as long as 2 years, according KFF Health News.

The imposter was allegedly married to Peggy A. Randolph, a social worker who was licensed in Florida and Tennessee and worked for Brightside Health, an online therapy company, according to an investigation by the Florida Department of Health. Randolph’s wife reportedly impersonated her during online sessions as part of a “coordinated effort,” according to the health department.

The deceit was only uncovered after the alleged impostor’s death last year. At that time, a patient reportedly realized they had been speaking with the wrong person during previous online therapy sessions, according to a Tennessee Department of Health settlement agreement.

Randolph reportedly denied having any knowledge of her wife’s actions, but the agreement noted that she had “received compensation for the sessions conducted.”

Randolph has voluntarily surrendered her social worker licenses in both states, KFF Health News reported. Brightside Health told KFF Health News the company was “extremely disappointed that a single provider was willing to violate the trust that Brightside and, most importantly, her patients had placed in her.”

The company said it notified and refunded all patients affected by the fraud, but declined to report how many patients were affected. However, the company had also recently alerted HHS that 767 individuals were exposed to a data breach by an “unauthorized individual,” the news outlet reported.

Disciplined Doctors Hired at Wisconsin Jail

Over the past decade, nearly a third of staff physicians in the Wisconsin state corrections system have been censured by state medical boards for medical errors or ethics violations, according to a New York Times investigation.

Of the 60 staff physicians employed in the past decade, nearly all had been disciplined before working in the state’s corrections system, the Times reported.

Many have faced lawsuits from inmates alleging medical errors that caused serious harm. In fact, at least 32 lawsuits have been settled in the past decade, totaling $692,000, and other cases are still pending, according to the news outlet.

Discipline rates among the corrections system physicians far exceeded that of all physicians in the state, as just 1.23 of every 1,000 Washington physicians were disciplined from 2019 to 2021, according to a report from Public Citizen.

In a statement provided to the Times, a state corrections department spokesperson noted that every physician hired by the prison system must have an unrestricted Wisconsin medical license. But state corrections officials have also said that staffing is the system’s largest and most persistent concern, according to the Times.

Sheldon Wasserman, MD, a former chairman of the Wisconsin Medical Examining Board, reviewed details about some of the physicians employed by the corrections system and told The Times, “[a] lot of these people are not employable.”

FDA Says Former Employees Can Influence ‘Behind the Scenes’

While agency rules forbid former FDA employees from lobbying the agency directly, they can work “behind the scenes,” according to a BMJ investigation.

The BMJ obtained an email from the FDA’s ethics program staff to Doran Fink, who had worked on reviewing COVID vaccines before taking a job with Moderna, which contained “tailored” recommendations on post-employment restrictions. While former employees are prohibited from a “variety of types of lobbying contact,” they’re not prevented from working “behind the scenes.”

“So, people will leave government service and can immediately start doing influence peddling and lobbying,” Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, told BMJ. “They can even run a lobbying campaign, so long as they don’t actually pick up the telephone and make the contact with their former officials — and that’s exactly the advice that’s being given here.”

Advice about working behind the scenes also appeared several times in emails to Jaya Goswami, another FDA employee who worked on COVID vaccines before taking a job with Moderna, BMJ reported.

Notably, the agency’s guidance has been part the standard advice sent to employees for years, and has even been included on an FDA webpage outlining post-employment restrictions since June 2017, the BMJ reported.

An agency spokesperson told BMJ it does not consider working behind the scenes to be the same as direct or indirect lobbying. The spokesperson added that former employees need to adhere to these lobbying requirements governed by the Lobbying Disclosure Act, “just like any other individual or organization.”

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