A Lake Oswego medical device company faces a lawsuit for allegedly laying off an employee who raised concerns about physician kickbacks and product defects.
Jon Walburg, the former regional sales director for Biotronik — which has its U.S. headquarters on Jean Road in Lake Oswego — filed the lawsuit in April and the case was transferred from Minnesota District Court (Walburg is a Minnesota resident) to Oregon District Court this month. The lawsuit was first reported by The Lund Report.
Biotronik had already paid a $13 million settlement in 2022 for allegedly providing kickbacks to physicians to prompt them to use their products, along with submitting false claims to Medicare and Medicaid (the company denied wrongdoing).
According to this year’s lawsuit, Walburg said he was pressured to provide kickbacks to physicians in the form of no-cost replacements of implantable devices that monitor for cardiac arrhythmias and could write that off by claiming the physician was never trained (even though they were).
Walburg told Biotronik leaders that “the company was exposing itself to risk because Medicare could discover it was being charged for replacement devices as part of a business decision to increase revenue, when the devices should have qualified for Medicare warranty credits due to the known battery defect, by either being recalled or having a longer warranty” according to the lawsuit.
Later, the suit alleges that Walburg discovered that the devices were experiencing rapid...
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