RCDeCade: 10 Years and Still Counting

June 12, 2018

Remember hearing those stories about how your grand-PIs had to walk five miles, in the snow, uphill, with no shoes just to learn how NIH spent its research budget? Well, believe it or not, but that was just ten years ago. Today, we have the Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) webtool to do this in a blink of an eye. Now, following the official release of Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 data and updated estimates for FYs 2018 and 2019 last month, we wanted to celebrate a successful decade of service.

Burden of Disease and NIH Funding Priorities

June 19, 2015

Recently, many voices have asked how NIH considers public health needs when setting funding priorities. The quick answer is that public health needs are a critical factor in our decision making—in addition to scientific merit, portfolio balance, and budgetary considerations. But the question of how one measures public health need, as it turns out, isn’t as simple as you might think.

Public health needs are not only reflected by how many people have a particular disease, but also by the burden of disease – the impact of a health condition as measured by mortality, morbidity, ….