Dr. Zeljko Stjepanovic, 59, was sentenced to 57 months in prison for unlawfully prescribing Oxycodone and Tramadol to patients at a Richmond-area pain management practice. According to court documents, Stjepanovic worked in a pain management practice, initially in Fredericksburg and later in Henrico County. He admitted that between 2014 and 2018 he wrote prescriptions for several patients without assessing the individual needs of those patients, and that his prescribing practices were outside the usual course of his professional practice and were without any legitimate medical purpose. Authorities opened an investigation of Stjepanovic following numerous complaints from area pharmacies about his prescribing practices. As part of that investigation, two undercover officers, Patient 1 and Patient 2, made a total of four visits to Stjepanovic. On at least two of those occasions, Stjepanovic prescribed Tramadol for Patient 1, but put the prescription in the name of Patient 2. Before the first instance, Stjepanovic notified both Patient 1 and Patient 2 that he knew what he was doing was illegal, but he proposed doing it nonetheless. On one of these occasions, Patient 1 was not even present when Stjepanovic wrote the Tramadol prescription. At no point did Stjepanovic or anyone working on his behalf ever obtain a medical history for Patient 1, conduct any physical examination or range of motion test for the patient, discuss causes of pain or what might alleviate it, consider any non-medicine based alternative treatments, or obtain or analyze any urine samples. Stjepanovic maintained no records for his treatment of Patient 1 on these two occasions.
