331 Trends in Public and Private Funding of Neurosurgical Subspecialties From 2015 to 2021

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services established the Open Payments Database (OPD), designed to track all general and research payments made by corporations to physicians, to promote greater financial transparency. While previous studies have analyzed general payments using the OPD database, there has been no investigation into public vs. private research payments related to neurosurgery from 2015 to 2021. METHODS: A cross-sectional analysis of the OPD and NIH RePORTER was conducted from 2015 to 2021 for research payments to neurosurgeons and payments tagged with the keyword “neurosurgery.” The data was cleaned; the primary investigators were subclassified according to the neurosurgical subspecialty of their research, and descriptive statistics were computed for payments at the provider and manufacturer levels. RESULTS: The total public and private funding for neurosurgery from 2015 to 2021 was $1,008,953,855.00 and $171,326,087.05, respectively. Public funding has a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.37%, and private funding has a CAGR of 7.46%. Neurovascular was the highest privately funded subspecialty at 26.2%, and neuro-oncology was the highest publicly funded subspecialty at 32.1%. CONCLUSIONS: We found significant growth in neurosurgery funding in the private and public sectors from 2015 to 2021. Private funding emphasizes neurovascular research the most and neurosurgical pediatric research the least, whereas public funding focuses on neuro-oncology research, with the least funding for neurosurgical spine research. These findings offer valuable insights into funding trends and characteristics in neurological research, highlighting the differences between funding sources and promoting equitable distribution to advance the field.