It is familiar and makes me somewhat feel slightly ill, but it was refreshing to see that action is being taken. Just a note, however, that the fraud was not discovered by CMS but instead the case derived its impetus from the persistence of two (justifiably) disgruntled former employees. I suspect that many companies are just one disgruntled employee away from facing a similar experience. In this case, except for the monumental stupidity that these complainants' superiors evinced in ineptly dealing with their employees, the violations likely would never have been detected by CMS.
http://pathologyblawg.com/wp-content...-Complaint.pdf
Wild West of Molecular Testing? Lawsuit Alleges Caris Engaged in Aggressive Marketing
http://www.cancerletter.com/articles/20140808_1
http://www.cancerletter.com/articles/20140808_3
Note: Foundation Medicine is not any different than Caris Diagnostics in Phoenix (now Miraca Life Sciences), beyond testing for standard pathology "targets" such as ER, PR, Her2, EGFR mutations, KRAS, BRAF. They aren't worth much for the sorts of chemotherapy which is used in 95% of all cancers and useless with respect to drug combinations. While fresh tissue is very dear and hard to come by, function trumps structure, in terms of potency and robustness of information provided than using archival paraffin blocks.
Batch Processing of tumor biopsies for cell markers
http://cancerfocus.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3976
Cell Lines vs Fresh Cells
http://cancerfocus.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3702
Hybrid Mode
