The Relationship between Industry Payments on Research Productivity and Career Success of Academic Radiation Oncologists

The Physician Payments Sunshine Act in 2010 required industry funding of physicians to be publically reported, now enabling assessment of the effects of industry funding on physician productivity in the field of radiation oncology. The goal of this paper is to further investigate whether there is a direct correlation between industry payments and physician productivity and success, as defined by total publications, h-index, or academic rank, for academic radiation oncologists. This study examined the relationship between industry payments, research productivity, and academic title in academic radiation oncologists. Industry payments data was obtained from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payment database, and bibliometric data was obtained from Scopus. Statistical analyses were performed using on Stata/IC 15.1. Significance was defined as p \u3c 0.05. The annual mean general payments to Professors, Associate Professors, Assistant Professors, and Instructors were $3626, $1293, $622, and $217 respectively. The annual mean research payments were $15813, $7022, $1616, and $293 respectively. Our analysis revealed a significant direct correlation between industry funding and H-index for associate professors, assistant professors, and clinicians/other, but this relationship was not significant for professors and instructors. While both general and research payments was significantly associated with H-index when examined separately, this association was insignificant for general payments when controlling for academic rank, region, degrees, research payments, and gender. A multivariate model showed that an increase in $10,000 annually in research payments was associated with a 1.19-times increase in odds to be in the top quartile of publications and a 1.10-times increase in odds to be in the top quartile of h-index. Increased research productivity is significantly associated with increased academic rank and industry payments. However, when controlling for confounding variables, research payments, and not general payments, are a significant driver of this relationship