Women cardiologists receive lower payments from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) than men in both the inpatient and outpatient settings, according to new data published in JAMA Cardiology. They also appear to submit fewer charges to CMS, the study's authors explained.
Using a 2016 CMS database, researchers analyzed reimbursement data to cardiologists, charges submitted and unique billing codes. The outcomes included median CMS payments received and median charges submitted in the inpatient and outpatient settings.
The analysis included a total of 20,273 cardiologists who received CMS payments in 2016. A total of 17,524 of those cardiologists received CMS payments in the inpatient setting, and just 13% of those cardiologists were women.
Also, 16,929 cardiologists received CMS payments in the outpatient setting. Again, just 13% were women.
The authors found that men received higher median CMS payments in the inpatient ($62,897 vs. $45 ,288) and outpatient ($91,053 vs. $51,975) settings compared to women.
In addition, the median number of charges sent by men were higher in both the inpatient (1,190 vs. 959) and outpatient (1,685 vs. 870) settings.
The team offered several potential reasons for these differences.
“Perhaps most importantly, the difference in payments appears to be due to a difference in coding patterns or clinical practices and not a CMS reimbursement gender bias,” wrote lead author Inbar Raber, MD, of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues. “Our findings suggest that women are submitting fewer charges compared with men. Accordingly, this will affect the total value of CMS payments to men and women. The lower number of charges submitted by women may reflect different practice styles between men and women.”
Raber et al. noted that it could also reflect differences in the volume of patients seen and/or differences in assigned service responsibilities.
“A 2020 study found that female primary care physicians generated less revenue owing to a lower number of patient visits but spent more time with direct patient contact than their male counterparts,” the authors wrote.
Additional research is still needed to identify gender differences in reimbursement and to understand why potential gender-associated differences in payment exist, the authors concluded.
Read the full study here.
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