As reported by Business Week, Boston Scientific Corp., the world’s biggest maker of heart stents, has agreed to pay $22 million to settle allegations that the company’s Guidant unit used clinical studies to pay kickbacks to doctors for using its products. Guidant paid physicians a fee of $1,000 to $1,500 each to participate in one of four studies it said were designed to assess the performance of pacemakers and defibrillators, the U.S. Department of Justice said today in a statement. In reality, the company was paying doctors to select Guidant devices over competing products, the government said.

“Although medical-device and pharmaceutical companies can use post-market studies legitimately to obtain information about how their products work in the field, they cannot use those studies, and the honoraria associated with them, to induce physicians to use their products,” U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz in Boston said in the statement. Boston Scientific will enter into a corporate integrity agreement, which requires the Natick, Massachusetts-based company’s cardiac rhythm management unit to disclose payments to doctors on its Web site.

Read the full story on the Business Week website.