In a new insight, Health Care Data Analyst Parth Dahima provides a brief overview of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) background and structure as the largest funder of global biomedical research, and highlights areas of potential improvement in its funding strategies, allocation processes, and overall research impact.

Key points:

• The NIH invests more than $45 billion annually, and its choices in funding dispersal dictate the state of research both domestically and internationally.
• Researchers have voiced concerns that NIH’s funding priorities fail to reflect contemporary disease burdens, do not account for geographic and institutional disparities in grant allocation, and often unduly favor late-career scientists, and have in response proposed a range of reforms.
• Proposed reforms include the promotion of new productivity metrics in funding decisions and increasing variety among funded institutions, states, and experience levels to foster greater efficiency and more multi-faceted, novel research.

Read the analysis