With respect to all Open Payments data available for 2015, a total of 618,000 physicians in all specialties received a total payment amount of $7.52 billion, with 11.9 million payments made.
6 In the 2015 calendar year, a total of 81,977 payments were made to 12,078 cardiologists, amounting to $13,906,167.43 and representing 0.2% of all payments accounted for that year. The minimum payment made to a cardiologist was $1.16, and the maximum payment was $2,805,825. The median amount received by a cardiologist in 2015 was $258.92. The payment categories included 12 distinct groups: charitable contribution; compensation for services other than consulting, including serving as faculty or as a speaker at a venue other than a continuing education program; compensation for serving as faculty or as a speaker for a nonaccredited and noncertified continuing education program; consulting fee; education; entertainment; food and beverage; gift; grant; honoraria; royalty or license; and travel and lodging. The category with the highest value was compensation for services other than consulting, including serving as faculty or as a speaker at a venue other than a continuing education program ($8,105,139.92). The second highest value category was consulting fees ($2,134,400.97), followed closely by food and beverage ($1,956,174.97). The category with the lowest value was gifts ($280.00). The distribution of all categories is presented in
Table 1.
A total of 45 GPOs submitted payments to a cardiologist. AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, LLC, was the submitting GPO with the highest overall payment submissions, which were valued at $7,211,860 and accounted for 51.85% of total payments to cardiologists. Biosense Webster, Inc, was the second highest, accounting for $3,486,735 (25.07%), followed by St. Jude Medical, Inc, with $884,122 (6.36%), ZOLL Services LLC with $836,769 (6.02%), and Thoratec Corporation with $709,814 (5.10%) (
Figure). These top 5 medical corporations accounted for $13,129,300 (94.41%) of all payments to cardiologists. The top 25 companies’ total payments are presented in
Table 2.The next step incorporated the range of payments in monetary value with their frequency to physicians, assessed in categories of less than $10; $11 to $50; $51 to $100; $101 to $500; $501 to $1000; $1001 to $5000; $5001 to $10,000; $10,001 to $15,000; $15,001 to $20,000; $20,001 to $25,000; and more than $25,000. The most frequent category was $11 to $50, with 53,722 payments (65.53%), followed by less than $10 with 12,307 (15.01%) payments made. More than 80% of all payments made were valued at less than $10. A decreasing trend in the amount of payments by medical industries was seen when payments above $5000 were made (
Table 3).