National Institutes of Health: Gender Differences in Radiology Funding.

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVE: Radiology has traditionally remained one of the most male-dominated specialties, although a higher proportion of women are now beginning to occupy roles as academic radiologists than their male counterparts. The present study investigated trends in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding within Diagnostic Radiology stratified by gender, and correlated with measures of academic output, including h-index. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Data on funding was obtained from the online NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditure and Results for fiscal years 2016-2019, and information regarding each Principal Investigator (PI) was obtained from the Scopus database and departmental websites. Mann-Whitney U tests were performed on collected data for statistical comparison of continuous variables. RESULTS: Of the 2929 grants included in this analysis, 1789 (61.07%) were awarded to male PIs and 1140 (38.9%) to female PIs.  Among PIs holding a PhD degree, male PIs had a higher mean grant amount ($619,807.00) compared to female PIs ($158,486.00). CONCLUSION: Although female representation within academic radiology has been increasing, the mean NIH grants awarded to women is less than that awarded to men. Reasons for this are numerous and may include differential prioritization of career objectives among men and women, although such rationalization is inevitably speculative in nature. Significant gender differences in NIH funding were seen at the PhD level, and the strongest correlation between NIH funding and academic output was observed for the h-index of female PIs. These results underscore the fact that women are ostensibly being held to a higher academic standard than men in terms of funding decisions.

The Physician Payment Sunshine Act: Evaluating Industrial Payments in Radiology.

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES: The characterization of payments made to physicians by pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, and group purchasing organizations is crucial for assessing potential conflicts of interest and their impact on practice patterns. This study examines the compensation received by general radiologists (GR) in the United States, as well as radiologists in the following five subspecialties: body imaging, neuroradiology, pediatric radiology, nuclear radiology and radiological physics, and vascular and interventional radiology. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Data were extracted from the Open Payments database for radiology subspecialists in the United States who received installments in calendar year 2015 from pharmaceutical and device manufacturing companies. RESULTS: In 2015, a total of $43,685,052 was paid in 65,507 payments (mean $667/payment; median $32/payment) to radiologists, including 9826 GR, 362 body imaging radiologists, 479 neuroradiologists, 127 pediatric radiologists, 175 physicians in nuclear radiology and radiological physics, and 1584 vascular and interventional radiologists. Payments were unequally distributed across these six major subspecialties of radiology (p < 0.01), with GR receiving the largest number of total payments (44,695), and neuroradiologists receiving significantly higher median payments than any other subspecialty ($80 vs $32 for all radiologists; p < 0.01). Medtronic Neurovascular was the single largest payer to all radiologists combined. CONCLUSION: Commercial entities make substantial payments to radiologists, with a significant variation in payments made to the different radiology subspecialties. While the largest number of total payments was made to GGR, the highest median payments were made to neuroradiologists, and significant dispersion in these payments was seen across different geographic regions. The impact of these payments on practice patterns remains to be elucidated.