Performance evaluation in biomedical research - who cares??

Billions of dollars are invested in biomedical research every year. NIH alone invests over 28 billion dollars/year. In contrast with the volume of funding, it is surprising to learn that we know very little about the return on this investment. Despite, a constant effort lead by institutions such as the Science and Innovation branch of the OECD, progress has been slow. Of course this is not caused by a lack of interest, but primarily by an inherent complexity in biomedical research systems. Long time lags, spillover effects, difficulties in tracking the transition from science to technology, and the now global patterns of diffusion in scientific information are just a few of the factors making any type of evaluation extremely complex.

But who should care? In other words, who are the stakeholders? They are distributed at multiple levels. Decision makers directly in charge of funding distribution include policy makers at both the institutional, government, and corporate levels. Researchers themselves are obviously interested, since their performance and careers are measured through these indices. Corporate executives and anyone involved with the market should be concerned since investments in research will influence which new products, companies, and patents will reach the market after a period of time. Finally, you should be interested even if you are not a policy maker, a person involved with the market, or a researcher. Obviously, the endproduct of biomedical research will affect you through either improvements in healthcare or new health-related products.

Despite a large number of stakeholders, at this point research performance relies on some data, a few indices, and a vast lack of knowledge of how biomedical research systems work. Maybe this could be an opportunity for a System Dynamics approach.