Consulting fees collected by interventional radiologists climbed more than 65% over a recent five-year period, according to new research published Wednesday.
Members of the subspecialty earned about $2.8 million from this extra work in 2014, which leapt to $4.6 million a few years later. When removing certain outliers, the gain was more than 215% over the half-decade ending in 2018, Johns Hopkins experts detailed in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.
Reasons for this uptick are likely complex, including marked economic prosperity during this time span alongside a greater number of clinical trials and rising healthcare spending.
“The variability in the amount of these payments is substantial and may reflect, at least in part, the increasing clinical relevance of the specialty,” Andrew Kolarich, MD, with the Baltimore-based institution’s department of radiology, and co-authors wrote Aug. 18. “As IR continues to play an important role in device development and growing healthcare expenditures in the United States, continued scrutiny of industry payments will be a reality that all interventional radiologists should expect.”
To reach their conclusions, Hopkins researchers utilized the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Open Payments Database, created through the Sunshine Act in 2010. During the five years ending in 2018, interventional radiologists received $79.8 million in payments, with $17.6 million (22%) coming via consulting. The median physician received about $5,050 in total annual consulting fees each year, with that number climbing from $4,327 up to $5,419 by the end of the study. The number of IR docs collecting money from this side work also increased from 156 up to 219 by 2018.
Sirtex Medical, a Massachusetts-based device manufacturer, paid the highest total in consulting fees to IR physicians at more than $5.1 million. When looping in diagnostic radiologists, the top contributors were Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. ($21.5 million), Pfizer Inc. ($11.8 million) and Sirtex ($8.3 million). The latter’s lead product is a targeted radiation therapy for liver SIR-Spheres Y-90 resin microspheres, which has gradually expanded into other uses, Kolarich et al. noted. Its primary competitor—the TheraSphere, made by BTG International Inc. during the study period—however, paid substantially less consulting fees to physicians.
“The expansion of niche interventional oncology clinical trials in the hopes of expanding FDA approval for SIR-Spheres and TheraSpheres will likely continue to expand consulting relationships between interventional radiologists and industry,” the authors predicted.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.