Corporations acquired 113 radiology practices, imaging centers over 11-year period
Corporate-backed entities acquired about 113 radiology practices and imaging centers over the 11 years ending in August.
The South was the most active region with 50 deals, including 18 in Texas and 15 in Florida, experts wrote Thursday in the Journal of the American College of Radiology. Meanwhile, 2021 was the busiest year for corporate dealmaking in diagnostic imaging, with roughly 18 deals—likely motivated by financial struggles and volume declines amid the pandemic.
The findings were derived from an analysis of two market databases (CB Insights and Pitchbook) utilizing radiology-related keywords. Researchers believe continued monitoring of these trends is warranted.
“It remains to be seen why transaction activity appears to have peaked in 2021,” Jefferson Chen, MD, with NYU Langone Health in New York City, and co-authors wrote Jan. 30. “It has been speculated that [the] decrease in activity [in 2024] may be due to macroeconomic conditions including increasing costs of capital, downstream effects from the recent No Surprises Act, or an adversarial regulatory environment. Furthermore, as corporate entities occupy a greater role in the field of radiology, future research needs to address their subsequent impacts.”
Chen and colleagues filtered transactions to only include those related to private equity, including venture capital and publicly traded entities. They also manually examined the list to filter out businesses in veterinary medicine, PACS providers, radiopharma firms and those in imaging equipment repair.
The number of radiologists associated with these transactions was only available in about 42% of instances. Most commonly, corporate entities acquired practices employing between 50 to 99 physicians, with a range of between 1 and 800. Previous research has associated corporate acquisitions with decreased access to urology services among Medicaid patients, increased costs in dermatology, and staffing cuts/reduced care quality in skilled nursing, the authors noted. Research has been “scant” on how PE impacts radiology. However, one 2023 analysis from the American Antitrust Institute estimated that private equity ownership led to an 8.2% increase in imaging prices.
“For radiologists, their productivity, income, and job satisfaction may all be affected by these acquisitions,” the authors concluded. “For patients, their ability to access medical imaging and the quality and affordability of their radiologic care may be compromised.”
Read more, including potential study limitations, in JACR here. You also can read an alternate take on the corporatization of radiology here.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.