News Digest 26.07.2024 — 29.07.2024
Regulators
Courts: customers have the right to reject equivalent medical products in public procurement
In April 2023, Morozov Children's City Clinical Hospital began looking for a contractor to provide a port system for the oncology department. The companies Endo-Med and Rikon took part in the competitive events, but the hospital rejected the application of the first participant, citing the unreliability of the information contained in it. The customer emphasized that the public procurement required a port/catheter, infusor/injection, implantable. Endo-Med offered to supply the MYPORT kit for implantation of a subcutaneous port for all three positions, the company proposed to "cover" the first two positions of the hospital's technical specifications with silicone catheters included in the kit. On this basis, Rikon was appointed the winner of the auction. Representatives of Endo-Med considered the rejection of their application to be unlawful and appealed to the Moscow UFAS, which ordered the Morozov Children's City Clinical Hospital to cancel the protocol for summing up the results of determining the supplier and to re-examine all applications. The hospital, in turn, filed a lawsuit in the Moscow Arbitration Court in May 2023 to appeal the UFAS decision. The court sided with the plaintiff and ordered the UFAS to cancel its decision.
Endo-Med attempted to appeal the decision of the Moscow Arbitration Court of Appeal in the Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal, the Moscow District Arbitration Court, and then in the Supreme Court (SC) of the Russian Federation. The appellate courts refused to appeal the decision of the first court, and the SC did not find any judicial errors in the previous court documents and, on this basis, refused to transfer Endo-Med's cassation appeal for consideration by the Judicial Collegium for Economic Disputes of the SC. The Moscow Arbitration Court and the Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal indicated that medical organizations are liable for violating rights in the field of health care, and the supply of goods that do not meet the customer's requirements may negatively affect the quality of medical care, the health of patients, and also lead to the disruption of the treatment process. "The customer has the right to purchase the goods that he needs and establish requirements for the supplied goods, which are aimed at determining the compliance of the supplied goods with the needs of the customer," the decision of the Moscow Arbitration Court emphasizes.
At the moment, as indicated in the Unified Information System "Purchases", the determination of the supplier for the purchase of port systems is still suspended due to the complaint.
In February 2024, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation also refused to consider the cassation appeal of the Medikom company. The manufacturer and distributor of medical equipment tried to challenge the purchase by the Voronezh City Clinical Polyclinic No. 4 of an electrocardiograph compatible with the "Cardiotechnica-07" ECG decoding and analysis complex installed at the customer's site. Medicom considered this clarification to be a requirement that restricts competition. The company filed a complaint with the Federal Antimonopoly Service, but the regulator rejected it. The FAS decision was supported by the Voronezh Region Arbitration Court, the Nineteenth Appellate Arbitration Court, and the Central District Arbitration Court.
Market news
A cartel worth 200 million rubles in the supply of medical products was discovered in the Tomsk Region
The Tomsk Office of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has launched an unscheduled inspection of the medical supplier Grand Medical-Siberia LLC for signs of bid rigging. The company and three other unnamed individual entrepreneurs are suspected of bid rigging for the supply of medical products.
70 purchases with signs of violations for a total amount of over 200 million rubles have been identified. If the cartel agreement can be proven, an antitrust case will be initiated.
According to SPARK, Grand Medical-Siberia LLC was registered in Tomsk in 2017, and is currently owned by Evgenia Shinkevich. As of the end of 2023, the legal entity received revenue in the amount of 114.2 million rubles, of which more than 48 million rubles is net profit. Over the year, the company took part in nine trading procedures, and ten contracts were concluded for a total of 14.2 million rubles.
FAS and other supervisory authorities regularly report on discovered cartel agreements between medical suppliers in public procurement. In early July, the Samara prosecutor's office announced that it would collect 280 million rubles from companies involved in such a cartel.
And in March 2023, as MV wrote, the Chelyabinsk UFAS suspected 19 companies from Chelyabinsk, Magnitogorsk, Kurgan, Orenburg, Yekaterinburg, Moscow, St. Petersburg, the republics of Bashkortostan and Udmurtia of collusion for a total of almost 740 million rubles. The companies convicted of collusion in 2020-2021 participated in tenders for the supply of medical equipment and medical products (for example, endoscopes, X-ray systems, artificial lung ventilation devices, etc.).
Golikova warned NMIC against “fragmented” purchase of medical equipment
Federal medical organizations (FMO) will have to submit development programs to the government, which will comprehensively address the issue of introducing advanced diagnostic and treatment methods for complex patients by the fall of this year. This was announced on July 24 by Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova at the Healthy Society 2024 forum, the MV correspondent reports.
Talking about the new national project "Long and Active Life", which provides for the modernization of the FMO and the expansion of the network of national research medical centers (NMIC), Golikova recalled that since 2021 they have been financed directly from the budget of the Federal Compulsory Medical Insurance Fund. Over the past three years, the FMOs have accumulated certain experience and changed the structure of hospitalized patients, began to provide assistance, as expected, to patients with complex and severe diseases from all regions of the country. Now it is necessary to ensure further development of these institutions so that they actively introduce advanced medical technologies for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases and then spread their experience to other regional medical organizations. "We want to support federal medical institutions, but we want to warn against fragmented purchases of medical equipment, as has sometimes happened, so we are waiting for development programs that will comprehensively address the issue of introducing advanced methods of diagnosis and treatment of complex patients," the Deputy Prime Minister emphasized. "Such programs should be prepared by the fall of this year." In July, the Ministry of Health determined the funding volumes for expanding the NMIC network from 37 to 45 institutions. In 2025-2030, this will require 49.17 million rubles, MV reported.
The former head of VSK was arrested on suspicion of purchasing a tomograph at an inflated price
As Kommersant reported on July 24, initially, in October 2023, a criminal case was opened under the article on fraud on an especially large scale (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), under which the general director of Stroykhimproekt and the founder of Partner Plus Elena Lyakhovich, as well as its chief accountant Viktor Bilko, were detained. The investigation concerned the purchase of a tomograph for the Ninth Medical and Diagnostic Center of the Ministry of Defense with the alleged theft of department funds. According to the investigation, in August 2019, the Main Military Construction Directorate for Special Facilities, which was headed by Andrei Belkov before joining VSK, signed a state contract for the supply of a tomograph to a medical institution of the Ministry of Defense with Partner Plus LLC. The customer, as law enforcement officials claimed, wanted to receive a device manufactured by a German company, which would refuse to provide the tomograph to the defense department due to sanctions. Then Partner Plus purchased medical equipment from the official supplier of the German manufacturer for 114 million rubles. The state customer paid 121 million rubles under the contract, and Lyakhovich and other participants in the transaction received 7 million rubles, as the prosecution believed. The real cost of the tomograph, as specified in the contract, was 76 million rubles. The Interfax news agency was the first to report on the selection of a preventive measure for Andrei Belkov on July 25, 2024, citing the press service of the Tverskoy District Court. The term of arrest has not been publicly announced. There is also no publicly available information about when exactly Belkov left his post as head of VSK. On July 24, Kommersant, citing information from VSK itself, wrote that Belkov "has already been fired", but Interfax in its publication of July 25 calls Belkov the current general director of VSK. According to SPARK-Interfax on July 26, Darya Morozova is listed as the acting general director of VSK. In April 2024, the Investigative Committee reported the arrest of Deputy Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Timur Ivanov, who, among other things, supervised the work of VSK. He is suspected under Part 6 of Article 290 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (receiving a bribe on an especially large scale). Law enforcement agencies believe that Ivanov and businessman Sergei Borodin entered into a criminal conspiracy with third parties to receive a bribe in the amount of 1.185 billion rubles during contract and subcontract work for the needs of the Ministry of Defense. Ivanov is currently in custody, having been dismissed from his position due to loss of trust. Another criminal case of fraud in the purchase of ventilators for the needs of the Ministry of Defense is currently being considered. Its defendant is the deputy head of the S.M. Kirov Military Medical Academy, Pavel Veshkin, who was arrested in January 2024. The Investigative Committee claims that Veshkin, along with other suspects, in 2022, citing the spread of the "omicron" strain of coronavirus, concluded contracts with companies under their control at inflated prices for the supply of medical equipment and medicines. The amount of damage from their actions was estimated at 40 million rubles.
Other
Study: Patients do not trust AI recommendations
Experts from the Institute of Psychology at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg (Germany), the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge (UK) and the Medical Affairs Department of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer published the results of a study in Nature Medicine on how patients perceive medical consultations conducted by doctors using large language models based on artificial intelligence (AI), but presented to respondents in one of three options: “AI”, “human doctor”, and “human doctor + AI”. As the experimenters found out, people perceive the same recommendations differently if it is indicated that they were prepared by a doctor, AI, or a physician together with a language model. Patients considered recommendations supposedly issued by “real doctors” to be more sensitive, reliable, and were more willing to follow them.
Source: https://vademec.ru/news/2024/07/26/issledovanie-patsienty-ne-doveryayut-rekomendatsiyam-ii/
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