Original articleOwnership or Leasing of CT Scanners by Nonradiologist Physicians: A Rapidly Growing Trend That Raises Concern About Self-Referral
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
We used the Medicare Part B Physician/Supplier Procedure Summary Master Files for 2001 through 2006. These files provide utilization data on all Current Procedural Terminology®, Fourth Edition, codes for the more than 37 million fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries in the United States. For each code, the files provide annual procedure volume; place of service where the examinations were carried out; the specialties of the physicians filing the claims; identifiers to indicate whether claims
Results
As shown in Table 1, Medicare private-office CT volume in 2001 was 1,500,316. This increased to 3,366,616 in 2006, a 124% increase. The component figures are shown for radiologists, all nonradiologist physicians as a group, and IDTFs. Between 2001 and 2006, radiologists' private-office volume increased by 85%, compared with a 263% increase among nonradiologists and a 231% increase among IDTFs. Figure 1 plots the volume for nonradiologists for each of the 6 years. Note a continuous upward trend,
Discussion
Our results show that the trend in CT acquisition or leasing by nonradiologist physicians is similar to that which is occurring with MRI [11]. Although the majority of CT scans in private offices are done by radiologists, the growth rate from 2001 to 2006 among nonradiologists was far higher (85% for the former, 263% for the latter). The result has been that the private-office CT market share of nonradiologists rose from 16% in 2001 to 28% in 2006.
A recent study by Mitchell [10] examined growth
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Cited by (0)
This study was supported in part by a grant from the American College of Radiology, Reston, Virginia.