SPECT and other nuclear medicine procedures have plummeted 9% since 2008

Nuclear medicine procedures involving SPECT, SPECT/CT and planar imaging have dropped an average 2.5 percent per year from 2008 to 2012 to more than 14.8 million imaging studies, down from 16 million exams, according to an October 2013 market report by IMV.

The report focused on planar and SPECT procedures and did not gauge the impact of PET on nuclear medicine procedure volume. IMV will be releasing PET data in a separate report. Several driving forces were noted in the dwindling of patient studies.

“We attribute this decline in [nuclear medicine] patient studies to several factors, including the impact of precertification requirements from health insurance companies, reduced reimbursement, and studies shifting to competing technologies, such as bone studies shifting to PET,” said Lorna Young, senior director of market research at IMV, in a press release.

The report is a result of more than 400 responses from a survey that went out this summer to nuclear medicine facilities, both hospital and physician practice. Respondees indicated that nuclear medicine practices appear to be consolidating and both hospital and non-hospital respondees indicated that the lull in procedure volume was due in large part to lower Medicare and third-party reimbursement.

More than 90 percent of planned gamma camera purchases are due to replacement. This includes SPECT, which comprises 40 percent of new purchases. The years 2015-2017 are expected to be “relatively active” for replacement. However less than 10 percent of planned purchases are for non-hospital physician practices.

A total of 8 million MPI studies were estimated to have been performed in 2012 and 80 percent of nuclear medicine procedures in non-hospital settings were cardiovascular. Neurology applications were expected to grow to one third of total nuclear medicine procedure volume by 2016.