Three indicted in Boston hospital procurement scandal

An IT consultant and two employees of a Boston hospital holding company face bribery charges in connection with the way the healthcare concern funneled software, hardware and consulting contracts to his company.

Brian Colpak, 44, owner of FutureTechnologies in Lynnfield, Mass., allegedly won "several hundred thousand dollars" in contracts by agreeing to pay kickbacks to the employees of Partners Healthcare, which owns 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.

The Attorney General's office says it began investigating last year, after hospital officials contacted them.

Prosecutors charge that Partners IT employees John DiMille, 49, of East Boston and John Cleary, 36, of Cambridge began directing work to FutureTechnologies in 2003. According to the Attorney General's office:

"Investigators discovered that from July 2003 through October 2007, Colpak paid the two men thousands of dollars for their help in obtaining contracts to provide IT systems and service for Partners and its entities, including the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. DiMille was a group leader in the Production Division of the Information Systems Department, and had a great deal of control as to who was awarded the contracts for the acquisition, installation and maintenance of these particular systems. As Master Engineer in DiMille's division, Cleary played a major role in reviewing the contracts for these systems."

FutureTechnologies's Web site says the company helped move Dana Farber to a large-scale high-availability system based on Oracle applications and two 24-way multi-domaining Sun Fire 6800 servers -- which the company claimed saved the cancer center $1 million a year.

The company also took credit for "a comprehensive service-maintenance package that delivers world-class engineering, as well as a sophisticated yet inclusive business continuity plan" for Partners, focusing on "invoicing between multiple hospitals as well as supporting an extremely complex IT infrastructure."

Colpak pleaded innocent today in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston to four counts of commercial bribery and one count of conspiracy to commit commercial bribery. DiMille pleaded innocent to commercial bribery and conspiracy to commit commercial bribery. Cleary, charged with two counts of commercial bribery, will be arraigned on Oct. 8.