Partners Healthcare consultant, employees face bribery charges

An IT consultant and two employees of Boston-based Partners Healthcare are facing bribery charges in connection with an alleged scheme under which the employees funneled IT work to a consultant in exchange for kickbacks. Partners includes Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

According to a statement from the Massachusetts attorney general's office, Brian Colpak, owner of Lynnfield, MA-based Future Technologies, purportedly won "several hundred thousand dollars" in contracts from Partners by agreeing to pay kickbacks to two key IT decision makers within Partners. Prosecutors contend that between July 2003 and October 2007, Colpak paid Partners IT employees John DiMille, who was group leader in the production division of the information systems department, and John Cleary, master engineer in DiMille's division, thousands of dollars to help his company obtain contracts to provide IT systems and services for Partners entities.

Future Technologies' work for Partners includes moving Dana-Farber to a high-availability system using Oracle applications and two 24-way multi-domaining Sun Fire 6800 servers, which the company said saved the cancer center $1 million a year.

To learn more about this case:
- read this Computerworld piece