Journal of the American College of Radiology : JACR
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The Hirsch index (h-index) has been shown to correlate with radiation oncology residents' having a first job in academics versus private practice, but it is limited by its inability to distinguish between the differing significance of coauthor roles in articles. ⋯ The average radiation oncology resident graduate has published a minimum of two first- and/or second-author articles cited at least twice. Graduates with PhDs and/or choosing academic careers were more likely to have higher hf and hs scores; there was no significant score difference by gender. Only 10% of graduates without any first- and/or second-author articles cited at least once secured academic jobs. These findings indicate that stratifying publications by first or second authorship when developing benchmarks for evaluating resident productivity and postresidency career type may be useful.
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As federal legislation increasingly influences health care delivery, the impact of election funding has grown. We aimed to characterize US radiologist federal political contributions over recent years. ⋯ Radiologist federal political contributions have increased over 3-fold in recent years. That growth overwhelmingly represents contributions to RADPAC. Despite national political polarization, the overwhelming majority of radiologist political contributions are specialty-focused and nonpartisan.
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Medicare payments to individual physicians are released annually by the CMS. The purpose of this study is to analyze trends in Medicare reimbursement and work relative value unit (wRVU) production to radiation oncologists. ⋯ The total number of wRVUs produced by radiation oncologists has risen by 14% from 2012 to 2015. However, the number of external beam radiation fractions has declined by approximately 7% over this same period, likely due to a trend toward hypofractionated courses of treatment and use of special treatment modalities such as proton beam therapy or stereotactic body radiation therapy.