Innovation, Royalties, and Introduction of the Patent Hirsch Index within U.S. Academic Neurosurgery

Intellectual Property and Royalty Payments Among Foot and Ankle Surgery Fellowship Faculty

Faculty of the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons and American Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Society fellowship programs are uniquely positioned to provide advanced clinical and surgical training to fellows. One aspect of this training may include product design and mentorship through the associated intellectual property (IP) and patent timeline. This study describes the payments received and IP held among foot and ankle surgery fellowship faculty. A review of foot and ankle surgeons with royalties or license payments disclosed on the CMS Open Payments Database from 2014 to 2020 was conducted. Members with payments were then cross-referenced with the US Patent Full-Text Database to identify patents held. Fellowship affiliation, practice location, patent office, number of patents, citations, patent h-index, type of patent, and yearly payment values were recorded. Among the 2801 surgeons, 53 fellowship affiliates and 46 nonaffiliates maintained at least 1 patent and royalty/license payment. A total of 576 patents and 19,191 citations were assessed. The median number of patents and citations held by fellowship faculty was 3 and 60, respectively, while the median total payment value reached $165,197.09. Fixation devices comprised most of the patents and citations. Payment value positively correlated with number of patents held (p = .01), citations (p = .007), and patent h-index (p = .01) among fellowship-affiliated surgeons. Foot and ankle surgery fellowship faculty payments for IP are associated with the number and citability of patents held. While a small proportion of faculty were paid for intellectual property, the number of patents held and citations was comparable to other specialties.

Differences in Financial Conflicts of Interest Among Participants in a National Spine Conference

STUDY

Retrospective Study.

OBJECTIVE

At the North American Spine Society (NASS) conference, participants may influence spine surgery practices and patient care through their contributions. Therefore, their financial conflicts of interest are of notable interest. This study aims to compare the demographics and payments made to participating surgeons.

METHODS

A list of 151 spine surgeons was created based on those who participated in the 2022 NASS conference. Demographic information was obtained from public physician profiles. General payments, research payments, associated research funding, and ownership interest were collected for each physician. Descriptive statistics and two-tailed t-tests were used.

RESULTS

In 2021, 151 spine surgeon participants received industry payments, totaling USD 48 294 115. The top 10% of orthopedic surgeons receiving payments accounted for 58.7% of total orthopedic general value, while the top 10% of neurosurgeons accounted for 70.1%. There was no significant difference between these groups' general payment amounts. Surgeons with 21-30 years of experience received the most general funding. There was no difference in funding between surgeons in academic or private settings. For all surgeons, royalties accounted for the largest percentage of the general value exchanged, while food/beverage accounted for the largest percentage of transactions.

CONCLUSIONS

Our study found that only years of experience had a positive association with general payments, and most monetary value belonged to a small handful of surgeons. These participants receiving significant money may promote techniques requiring products of companies providing their compensation. Future conferences may require disclosure policy changes so attendees understand the degree of funding participants receive.

Medical Product Innovation: A Primer for Early Career Cardiothoracic Surgeons

Many cardiothoracic surgeons have become less involved in the process of developing therapies and diagnostic tools. There is renewed interest in innovation as a discipline among early career cardiothoracic surgeons and trainees. We describe the role and the essential skillsets that cardiothoracic surgeons must be adopt in order to successfully contribute to medical product innovation.

Reach for the stars: disentangling quantity and quality of inventors’ productivity in a multifaceted latent variable model

Star inventors generate superior innovation outcomes. Their capacity to invent high-quality patents might be decisive beyond mere productivity. However, the relationship between quantitative and qualitative dimensions has not been exhaustively investigated. The equal odds baseline (EOB) framework can explicitly model this relationship. This work combines a theoretical model for creative production with recent calls in the patentometrics literature for multifaceted measurement of the ability to create high-quality patents. The EOB is extended and analyzed through structural equation modeling. Specifically, we compared a multifaceted EOB model with a single latent variable for quality, and a two-dimensional model that distinguishes between technological complexity and value of invention portfolios. The two-dimensional model had better fit but weaker factor scores (for the “value” latent variable) than the unidimensional model. These findings suggest that both the uni- and the two-dimensional approaches can be directly used for extending research on star inventors, while for practical high-stakes assessments the two-dimensional model would require further improvements.

Characteristics of Reported Industry Payments to Neurosurgeons: A 5-Year Open Payments Database Study

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study was to characterize the payments made by medical industry to neurosurgeons from 2014 to 2018.

METHODS

A retrospective study was performed from January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2018 of the Open Payments Database. Collected data included the total number of industry payments, the aggregate value of industry payments, and the mean value of each industry payment made to neurosurgeons per year over the 5-year period.

RESULTS

A total of 105,150 unique surgeons, with 13,668 (12.99%) unique neurosurgeons, were identified to have received an industry payment during 2014-2018. Neurosurgeons were the second highest industry-paid surgical specialty, with a total 421,151 industry payments made to neurosurgeons, totaling $477,451,070. The mean average paid amount per surgeon was $34,932 (±$936,942). The largest proportion of payments were related to food and beverage (75.5%), followed by travel and lodging (14.9%), consulting fees (3.5%), nonconsulting service fees (2.1%), and royalties or licensing (1.9%), totaling 90.4% of all industry payments to neurologic surgeons. Summed across the 5-year period, the largest paid source types were royalties and licensing (64.0%; $305,517,489), consulting fees (11.8%; $56,445,950), nonconsulting service fees (7.3%; $34,629,109), current or prospective investments (6.8%, $32,307,959), and travel and lodging (4.8%, $22,982,165).

CONCLUSIONS

Our study shows that over the most recent 5-year period (2014-2018) of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payments Database, there was a decreasing trend of the total number of payments, but an increasing trend of the total amount paid to neurosurgeons.