physician reimbursement by drug/hardware companies

Since some of these threads discuss fiscal motives, I thought you might be interested in the contrast between two frequently discussed EP's: Sanjiv Narayan (FIRM ablation) and Andrea Natale (Maestro).

The source of this is OpenPaymentsData. As that site explains:

Quote

Sometimes, doctors and hospitals have financial relationships with health care manufacturing companies. Open Payments is the federally run transparency program that collects information about these financial relationships and makes it available to you. These relationships can involve money for research activities, gifts, speaking fees, meals, or travel. One of the ways we provide this data to the public is through this search tool, which allows you to search for a doctor, teaching hospital, or company that has made payments. Exploring this information, and discussing the results you find with your healthcare provider, can help you make more informed healthcare decisions.

It's actually interesting data, with a line item for each payment.

The link for Dr. Narayan (2014) shows he received $10,981,153.04 in 48 transactions, where most are very small (meal reimbursements, etc), but one is $10,964,988.77, from Topera (his FIRM company).

The link for Dr. Natale (2014) shows he received about 100x less ($90,280.12 in 127 transactions, mainly meal reimbursements and small consulting fees.

It's kind of interesting to look up MD's whom one has interacted with, to see if their recommendations have any connection to their OpenPaymentsData line items.

That's an informative site. Thanks for sharing. You can do a search based upon the company paying fees too. Some of the payments are hidden, for example money paid to practice groups or hospitals for "research" that includes clinical trials of devices. Those are pretty big chunks of money beyond consulting fees and meals that don't appear on an individual doctor's file. However, there is no separate search function for hospitals and foundations so you have to search for those under the company's name. Narayan big paycheck probably came from the Abbott purchase of Topera. Abbott must be feeling kind of foolish right now given the results presented at HRS by Pierre Jais. Natale's group get a lot of TCAI "foundation" money so actual payments are higher than what they appear based upon search.

Abbott paid a bundle for Topera on the marketing hype and they will likely get their money back even though the Topera system appears to have some real issues to say the least.

But Topera set a new standard for hyping up a system and creating a huge demand before the bulk of real independent confirmation had even begun to come in and Im afraid other gear makers and their investors are following the gravy train by pushing the big money buy outs much too early and based mostly on 'early promise' rather than a large degree of real world independent proof to-date.

Ala Medtronics buying out Cardio-Insight for their non-invasive mapping vest system .. though Medtronic's apparently did that deal because they got a relatively price deal compared to the windfall Topera got from Abbott, and for what hopefully will turn out to be more useful tech .. though the jury is still out on that one as well. Time will tell.

Shannon