Cardiologists in the United States received more than $1 billion in speaker fees and other industry payments from 2014 to 2019, according to new findings published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.[1]

Although industry-physician collaborations can drive crucial scientific discoveries, indiscriminate financial relationships may introduce bias and overutilization in patient care, wrote first author Ruina Zhang, MD, with the department of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, and colleagues. In an effort to increase the transparency of industry payments to physicians, the Open Payments Program (OPP) was established and publishes data on industry-physician financial interactions. The effect of OPP on the field of cardiology is not fully understood.

Zhang et al. linked the OPP database with information from the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System database, focusing on all cardiology payments from 2014 to 2019. They stopped at 2019 due to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and its potential to heavily skew payment numbers.

Overall, cardiologists received $1.1 billion from 2014 to 2019. The total value of those payments fell from more than $210 million in 2014 to more than $164 million in 2019.

These are some other big takeaways from the groups research:

Diving deeper into the data, the researchers noted that 40.8% ($444.5 million) of cardiology payments were tied to speaker fees. Another 19% ($207.7 million) were from consulting fees.

Speakers fees dropped significantly over the studys six years, decreasing from more than $114 million in 2014 to approximately $54,000 in 2019.

Reduction of payments in this highly visible category may be attributed to an environment of increased transparency and associated heightened public and peer scrutiny, the authors wrote.

Consulting fees, meanwhile, increased from more than $29 million in 2014 to more than $33 million in 2019. The third biggest category, food and beverage-related payments stayed relatively the same over the course of the study, decreasing by less than $900,000 from 2014 to 2019.

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Cardiologists received $1.1B in industry payments in 6 years - Cardiovascular Business