September 18, 2013
Healio.com

Patients who are referred for knee MRIs are more likely to have negative results if a physician has a financial interest in the imaging equipment used, according to results of a recently published study.

“In our work, we were able not only to evaluate the outcome of the knee MRI examinations ordered by physicians with financial interest in the imaging equipment, but to compare this to another matched referral physician group that had no financial stake in the imaging equipment,” Matthew P. Lungren, MD, codirector of the Interventional Radiology Translational Research Lab at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., stated in a press release.

Lungren and colleagues calculated the number of negative results in 700 consecutive diagnostic knee examinations from 667 patients at one radiology practice between January 2009 and April 2009 for physicians who both did and did not have a financial interest in the imaging equipment used for knee MRI. Of the 700 examinations, they found that 117 of 350 MRI results in the group with a physician who held a financial interest returned negative, while 88 of 350 results in the group of physicians without a financial interest returned negative results, according to the abstract. However, there was no significant difference between the groups in the number of abnormalities per positive scan.

“This occurred despite otherwise highly similar pathology, demographics and referring physician characteristics between the two groups,” Lungren said. “These findings suggest that there is a different threshold for ordering MRI examinations which may be due to financial incentive.”

Reference:

Lungren MP. Radiology. http://radiology.rsna.org/content/early/2013/09/05/radiol.13130281