Demo: IQ Answers

See how Lighthouse AI & Analytics leader, Cassie Blum, uses IQ Answers to rapidly interrogate a million-plus item production from opposing counsel.

Start your risk-free trial of IQ Answers today.

Transcript:

Imagine you are an attorney general suing a pharmaceutical company that manufactures a synthetic opioid spray and you're alleging racketeering. You've received 1.5 million documents in production and your team has three weeks before the next case management conference. Traditional review would have meant that you would spend months and likely millions of dollars to interrogate your data. Let's see what IQ Answers can do in the next several minutes. First off, I'm gonna just ask general questions within my dataset to get a sense of what was going on with this product and who it was prescribed for and what was happening with those prescriptions. So I'm typing a question about that generally to see what that returns for me. You'll notice here at the end of the query that you get an overall answer, but you also get topics surfaced for you along with citations that match each of these topics that highlight the particularly important parts of the document that can help lead you to the conclusions that are surfaced for you with IQ Answers. So here we see that this was a spray that was approved for breakthrough cancer pain and that that was the FDA intent of the approval. But what I'm also seeing in these topics that is being surfaced for me is that a lot of off-label prescription for non-cancer pain is apparently going on with this product.

And I can tell that from these particular documents that I've clicked on here along with the citations where I'm seeing a hundred plus prescriptions a month that are off label. Well that's interesting. Now I'm also seeing that the salesforce has been explicitly instructed to prioritize high volume opioid prescription writers regardless of their specialty and regardless of what's happening with that prescription. And I can click into the documents and see that the volume is what is driving here. And then I also can look and see that there's been awareness internally that the approved indication from the FDA is not actually matching the patient population. So that's very interesting. It seems like we definitely have some use here that it was not intended, and I could figure that out in about 30 seconds in IQ Answers. I have the foundation. So, if the drug is approved for cancer pain, but the company is deliberately targeting non-cancer patients, that's definitely a gap from the FDA approval. And so, let's understand how they're going about making this happen. How are they getting doctors to keep writing these prescriptions? I'm going to go ahead and ask an additional question of IQ Answers to figure out what they're doing to get this volume of prescriptions written. And in particular, I noticed that there was something about speaker engagements that they were doing with doctors.

So I'm going to ask about those speaker engagements. And you'll see here that basically the speaker engagement program was a way for them to pay doctors for prescriptions. I can see that they were tracking the ROI of those speaker payments as compared to the amount of prescriptions a doctor was writing. And I can also see from the documents and the citations that if they did not feel that a doctor was writing enough prescriptions, they were no longer part of these speaking events and, and thus paid through these speaking events. I also see these speaking events are not really genuine educational activity and it looks like the company was aware of this and was terminating doctors when they were not writing enough prescriptions to satisfy the amount of money that they were giving the doctors. So this all does not look very great for them in terms of how these programs were essentially bribery of these doctors. So if they're bribing the doctors, that still doesn't answer for me what's happening with the insurance companies. The product costs thousands of dollars a month and insurance companies wouldn't just approve that without any questions. So Vantage clearly needed a way to get these insurers to pay. Let me ask about that. I'm gonna type in a question about their programs to deal with the insurance companies and the way in which they instructed their employees.

All right, so now I see in my answer that they had created what was called a Vantage Reimbursement Center. That was essentially their way of tracking the approvals from the insurance companies. And it looks like from the topics that's being surfaced here, that they were also using it as a vehicle to instruct their staff on how to deceive the insurance companies. In particular, here you can see in this document where they talk about using particular types of language, lingo, or diagnoses to get the insurance companies to approve the use of these drugs for the written prescriptions. But it also looks like they know that these are false statements that are being made when they are talking with the insurance companies. You can see here they're tracking and they want a 100% authorization success rate. So they're essentially giving all of their employees the way to beat the system, to cheat the insurance company, and to get them to approve something under false pretenses. So I now have two parallel fraud streams that are emerging here. One to bribe doctors to write prescriptions, one to deceive insurance companies to pay. For a RICO case, I also need to know that this was coming directly from management and from the top. So let's see if I can find that out in the dataset and ask a question about that to help me win my conviction.

Alright, so now I'm gonna ask in particular, what evidence do we have that the CEO knew about this speaker program and this insurance program? Now that I'm asking this of the documents, what I can see here that is surfacing is that in fact the CEO did have direct knowledge and there's multiple documents that substantiate this. And in particular you can see this one here where he personally directs a speaker fee increase that is tied to prescription volume. In this document, you would have him talking about different tiers of speaker programs and that someone is no longer going to be invited to be a part of these speaker programs if they are not writing a certain amount of prescriptions. There's one here that surfaces a document where a hundred percent of the authorization success rate is something that he is directing and he's also calling for in the data. You also see here that I have additional follow up questions that I can be asked that are being surfaced by IQ Answers that will help me investigate and interrogate each one of these particular questions and the information I found up in these questions.

But overall, it looks like I, in a matter of minutes, have been able to find key documents and important fact timelines that help me substantiate my case and know that I have a good chance of success moving forward and make me feel set up really well for my next case management conference.