Subpoena Targets 5 Tenet Hospitals

Tenet Healthcare Corp., the Santa Barbara-based hospital chain facing a number of probes of its practices, said late Thursday that it has received a federal subpoena seeking information about agreements it made with a group of cancer doctors.

The civil subpoena, from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, requests documents from five Tenet hospitals about their relationships with the Women’s Cancer Center, a Los Gatos-based physicians group, and 10 doctors who are or were part of the group, Tenet said. It refused to name the physicians.

The nation’s second-largest for-profit hospital chain has been under fire since last fall, when government probes were launched into several Tenet hospitals and practices, including its method for billing Medicare for so-called outlier payments for the most expensive treatments.

“This is a new investigation that is not related to any of the current investigations,” Tenet spokesman Steven Campanini said. “We’d like to stress this is absolutely not related to quality or patient-care issues.”

The subpoena is seeking documents from the Community Hospital of Los Gatos; Doctors Medical Center of Modesto; San Ramon Regional Medical Center; St. Luke Medical Center in Pasadena (now closed); and Lake Mead Hospital Medical Center in North Las Vegas, a hospital Tenet has said it plans to sell.

“Civil subpoenas for information from the [office of inspector general] are not uncommon in the highly regulated health-care industry, and we will cooperate fully,” said Christi R. Sulzbach, Tenet’s chief corporate officer and general counsel.

The Women’s Cancer Center bills itself as the largest group of physicians treating gynecological cancers in California with offices in Los Angeles, Pasadena, Whittier and Thousand Oaks.

Calls to the center were not returned.