A Claims-Based Method for Identification and Characterization of Practicing Interventional Radiologists

Area of Science:

• Radiology
• Health Services Research
• Medical Informatics

Background:

• Accurate identification of practicing interventional radiologists (IR) is crucial for research and healthcare analysis.
• Current claims data often misclassify radiologists performing IR procedures, primarily designating them as diagnostic radiologists.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and validate a novel research methodology for identifying practicing interventional radiologists using national claims data.
• To assess the effectiveness of a threshold-based approach on IR work volume for accurate specialty identification.

Main Methods:

• Utilized 100% Medicare Part B and Optum Clinformatics Data Mart (CDM) claims data (2015-2019).
• Ranked radiologists by the percentage of interventional radiology (IR)-related work (RVUs).
• Validated findings using Medicare self-designated specialty and Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) membership, employing Youden index and logistic regression.

Main Results:

• A significant proportion of radiologists performing IR work were not designated as such in claims data, especially at lower IR work thresholds.
• Increasing IR work percentage thresholds (10%, 50%, 90%) progressively identified more practicing interventional radiologists.
• Practicing interventional radiologists identified by this method were more likely to be male, metropolitan-based, and earlier in their careers.

Conclusions:

• Claims data specialty designations are insufficient for accurately identifying practicing interventional radiologists.
• The proposed method, based on the percentage of IR-related work effort, offers a more generalizable and comparable approach for claims-based IR research.