U.S. Medical School Participation in Nationally Funded Biomedical Research: A New Accounting of NIH Award Dollars

Abstract

To better understand the amount of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding received by U.S. medical schools with Liaison Committee on Medical Education-accredited medical education programs, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) developed a new methodology that crosswalks faculty NIH grants with medical schools and their affiliated organizations (e.g., teaching hospitals). This approach offers a more comprehensive and methodologically transparent accounting of NIH extramural funding to academic medicine than existing processes.The AAMC Crosswalk utilized publicly available grants data from the NIH and resources unique to the AAMC, such as the Faculty Roster and Council of Teaching Hospitals and Health Systems records. Using a multistep algorithm, the AAMC Crosswalk linked individual faculty with NIH grants, their organizations, and partner medical schools, aggregated at the level of the medical school and its affiliated organizations for fiscal year (FY) 2017-2021.The AAMC Crosswalk attributed, on average, $3.7 billion more per year in NIH funding to U.S. medical schools, representing a 24% increase compared to the NIH and Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research (BRIMR) methodologies. In FY 2021, the AAMC Crosswalk attributed 60% of NIH funding to U.S. medical schools compared with 47% by NIH and 50% by BRIMR. An exploration of limitations showed that no medical school affiliations were missed by the AAMC Crosswalk among 90 randomly sampled organizations, and medical school affiliations for 30 randomly sampled principal investigator faculty members were attributed correctly.These findings indicate that academic medicine's contribution to biomedical research may be greater than historically reported. Systematically accounting for grants awarded to faculty across medical schools and their affiliated organizations provides a more comprehensive understanding of NIH funding to U.S. medical schools. The AAMC Crosswalk provides a new tool to better estimate the true investment and role of academic medicine in advancing biomedical research.