Former Health Minister Arenberger Left Patients Without Clinical Trial Compensation for Years

Petr Arenberger, the former Czech Minister of Health who until recently headed the dermatology clinic at Prague's Vinohrady Hospital, has left the institution following a series of internal audits that uncovered serious irregularities in payments to patients participating in clinical drug trials. This is according to audit documents compiled by the hospital in March and May of this year.

Arenberger, widely regarded as a prominent and respected dermatologist, spent a quarter of a century at the clinic and briefly served as health minister in Andrej Babiš's government in 2021. In June he agreed with the hospital to end his employment there, but his departure was preceded by internal reviews whose findings proved deeply embarrassing for the 76-year-old physician.

According to the audit materials, all 17 patients enrolled in one of the trials had irregularities in their payment documentation. Four of them, auditors found, never received the money they were owed at all. Others were allegedly paid in cash, but the paperwork lacked a date, a doctor's or nurse's signature, or the patient's own signature.

The payments in question are compensation owed to trial participants for hospital visits related to examinations, lost time and inconvenience — for instance, in one oncology trial, compensation amounted to 800 crowns per medical visit. Auditors found that some patients received their money years late — and some died before ever being paid. Arenberger only arranged a mass payout covering these overdue visits in February this year, shortly before the targeted audit of his clinic began.

A separate "serious violation," as auditors described it, involved the company Farma.cz, which transferred money to some patients despite having no official role in the trial and no contract with the hospital. The company is registered at Arenberger's home address, and its listed owner shares a name with the doctor's mother-in-law. The hospital believes that bringing in an outside firm may have violated the personal data protection of oncology patients — this part of the investigation is ongoing.

Arenberger told investigators that he had paid patients out of his own pocket and using funds from a "commercial company" while awaiting reimbursement from the pharmaceutical companies sponsoring the trials, without disclosing that the company in question belonged to his family. He also insisted there had been no payment delays, arguing that the contracts set no fixed deadlines, and that a patient who had waited five years for compensation lived only a few hundred meters from the hospital. Auditors rejected this explanation, pointing out that under general clinical trial rules, payments must be made within a reasonable time regardless of where a participant lives.

The audits uncovered other violations as well: Arenberger kept records of patient examinations not in the hospital's information system but in ordinary text files, meaning some medical procedures were never billed to insurance companies — a lapse that caused direct financial losses for the hospital, the auditors' report notes. In addition, inspectors found no records in the medication tracking system confirming that three patients had actually received a drug required as part of the trial protocol — raising doubts about the legality of both its prescription and its billing.

Arenberger himself denies the alleged violations, claiming that the pharmaceutical companies funding the trials oversaw the entire process and raised no objections. He did not respond to a request for an interview, communicating only via text message. The hospital declined to release the full audit reports, offering only a summarized version that reads far more mildly than the original documents. A hospital spokesperson declined to say whether the institution accepts Arenberger's arguments or intends to revisit the audits' conclusions.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz