A traveling cardiologist who faced criticism for her management of a now-closed specialty heart program made more money at Benefis Health System in Great Falls than any of her full-time peers in that specialty.
In 2024, Dr. Kimberly Atianzar was among the 10 top-paid employees at the nonprofit hospital, but was the only non-full-time staffer on that list, according to tax filings. Compared to other major Montana health systems reviewed by Montana Free Press, her salary made her a rare cardiologist among top-paid employees, who are commonly staff neurological and orthopedic surgeons, radiologists and hospital administrators.
Benefis paid Atianzar $803,138 in 2024, according to the health system’s Form 990, a tax document required for nonprofit organizations. That is the most recent record available. While one expert told MTFP that the salary wasn’t an outrageous sum for a traveling physician billing full-time hours, former Benefis doctors and comments from hospital administrators indicate that Atianzar didn’t work full-time.
On its tax form, Benefis listed Atianzar as working an average of 50 hours per week. Former colleagues, however, said she worked for a few days every other week, though her compensation far exceeded that of the hospital’s full-time staff.
Atianzar led a specialty program at Benefis called transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, an alternative to open-heart surgery for primarily elderly patients.
Earlier this year, a Montana Free Press investigation featured multiple doctors who said Atianzar ignored dissenting opinions about how patients were selected for TAVR and that Benefis administrators downplayed those concerns. The report also revealed that Benefis was financially incentivized to perform more TAVR procedures to receive federal insurance reimbursement and remain competitive in a rural health care market.
Atianzar, who is based in California, traveled to Great Falls and was paid on a “per diem” basis by Benefis. While the health system was willing to pay Atianzar a high salary for her work leading the hospital’s early TAVR program, former doctors told MTFP that 50 hours a week was more than what the TAVR program demanded. Dr. Miroslaw Sochanski, a former Benefis cardiologist who was at the hospital with Atianzar in 2024, told MTFP that Atianzar often scheduled two or three TAVRs in a day. Patient consultations and staff meetings fit into another day or two before Atianzar flew back to her home base in California.
“There is no volume justification,” Sochanski said of the claim of 50 hours per week.
RELATED
A Montana hospital tried to build a cutting-edge heart program. It drove doctors away.
Three former Benefis doctors said the health system’s approach to patient selection for its TAVR program was a direct factor in their decisions to seek work elsewhere. When Benefis administrators appeared indifferent to their concerns, the doctors said, they chose to leave the hospital entirely.
Benefis closed its TAVR program at the end of 2025. Administrators previously told MTFP that the hospital intended to hire local, full-time staff before restarting TAVR sometime in 2026. Atianzar no longer works for Benefis, and the hospital removed promotional posts about her work, though administrators previously praised her.
Benefis has not responded to any inquiries from MTFP since the June investigation was published. Atianzar didn’t return a call or text for comment.
The national median salary for full-time cardiologists reached $695,000 in 2024, a record sum, according to a leading industry survey. For full-time interventional cardiologists, the median salary in the subspecialty that includes procedures like TAVR was $750,000, according to that survey.
The highest-paid people at Benefis have almost exclusively been full-time physicians or hospital administrators. No other Benefis cardiologist since Dr. Michael Eisenhauer in 2020 was among the hospital’s highest-paid employees, according to a review of tax forms. Eisenhauer earned $705,279 as a staff doctor in 2020 and served as a department director. He left the health system in 2024 and is now an independent candidate for Congress.
Across most other major Montana health systems, no cardiologist was among the top-paid employees at Kalispell Regional Medical Center, St. Peter’s Health in Helena or Billings Clinic. Intermountain Health, which operates St. Vincent Hospital in Billings, listed one Denver staff cardiologist among its top earners.
Two cardiologists with additional experience and administrative roles at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula appeared to make more than Atianzar, according to a filing from the hospital’s foundation. One was Dr. Daniel Spoon, a full-time employee who was also director of research for Providence Montana and the cardiovascular medical director of the Providence Clinical Innovation Institute. He became the hospital’s chief medical officer in 2025. The other was Dr. James T. Maddux, an interventional cardiologist who has practiced for decades at the state’s most established TAVR program. Both earned more than $1 million in 2024.
Atianzar, a 2007 graduate of St. George’s Medical School in Grenada, began working at Benefis in 2023, just a year into the launch of its TAVR program. While she did not have a board certification in interventional cardiology, as some of her full-time colleagues did, she had TAVR experience and had completed an interventional cardiology fellowship.
In a May interview with MTFP, Dr. Greg Tierney, Benefis’ executive vice president of system clinical operations, said that a cardiologist who left the hospital around 2023 referred Atianzar to Benefis. Their goal was to “stabilize” a fledgling TAVR program. Medicare, the federal insurer, requires hospitals to perform a certain number of procedures annually to maintain expertise and to be eligible for reimbursement.
Despite internal disputes around the TAVR program that led to at least three doctors leaving Benefis altogether, Tierney said in May that he had no issue with Atianzar’s performance and that they would welcome her back. The hospital’s long-term goal, however, was to have full-time physicians in Great Falls running the program.
“She did a great job for us,” Tierney said in May. “It’s just she has no intent of ever living in Great Falls.”
It’s not publicly known how Atianzar’s compensation was structured. But traveling practitioners are known to earn higher hourly rates than full-time staff members, a trend that was particularly pronounced among nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Mostly it’s that you have an immediate need that you’re not being able to fill,” Gerard Anderson, a health policy and hospital finance researcher at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, told MTFP. “And so you’re having to pay a premium for that immediate need.”
Anderson said that Atianzar’s compensation isn’t way out of line with high hourly rates for a traveling physician who might work 50 hours per week, as Benefis’ tax document states. But he said the setup raises other questions about demand for a hospital’s services.
“This is where the 50 hours bothers me. Often, a small hospital can’t afford a full-time cardiologist because they don’t have the work for a full-time cardiologist, cardiac surgeon or whatever,” Anderson said. “There’s just not the volume. But it would make no sense, if that’s the case, for her to bill 50 hours a week. Because that would mean there is a huge demand for those services.”
While Benefis declined to share the number of TAVRs performed there, a 2025 web post said that the hospital completed 55 TAVRs in 2024 (the post has since been deleted from the website). TAVRs typically take an hour or two to complete, according to hospitals and a major manufacturer of artificial valves.
Atianzar didn’t appear to contribute to on-call work in 2024, according to copies of internal Benefis cardiology department calendars reviewed by MTFP. The calendars let other departments, such as the emergency room, know which physician to contact each day for an immediate heart case.
In May, Tierney described Atianzar’s work as a “two-week on, two-week off” model. Multiple former doctors confirmed to MTFP that Atianzar was at Benefis every other week for three or four days and that 50 hours didn’t reflect her workload.
“I witnessed that she did not,” Sochanski said when asked if Atianzar worked 50 hours. “I never saw her physically in the hospital to that extent.”
In 2026, Benefis hired an interventional cardiologist and a cardiac surgeon to round out a heart and vascular staff that already had one surgeon. The hospital has not responded to questions about when it plans to resume its TAVR program.
LATEST STORIES
Initiative banning corporate money in elections gets a spotlight in Billings
Supporters of a ballot initiative to ban corporate spending in Montana elections hosted a Q-and-A at the Alberta Bair Theater in downtown Billings.
Jacobsen subpoena produces more frustration than answers
Montana lawmakers trying to get to the bottom of what state voter information was shared with the federal government say they still have questions, despite a subpoenaed response from Montana’s secretary of state.
Poll: Cost-of-living important factor for 80% of Montana registered voters
Montanans are having ongoing challenges affording housing, healthcare, gas and groceries, according to a new Montana Free Press-Eagleton poll of registered voters.
