Strategic Indicators for the Success of Medical Schools

Written by Carol Whitacre, PhD, Senior Advisor for Academic Analytics, former Senior Vice President

for Research at The Ohio State University

March 31, 2025

Higher education and specifically medical centers have come under attack in 2025 with such threats as cuts to Medicare/Medicaid, cuts to federal research funding, elimination of diversity training programs, halting specific lines of research, denigration of social determinants of health and assaults on patients and staff by immigration officials who now can freely enter medical clinics. During these times of stress to the medical community and higher education, it is important for medical center leaders to provide clear direction and messages about the importance of their mission. Never has it been more critical to highlight the centrality of academic medicine to the health of the nation. Where would we be without biomedical research fueling the advancements in health care?

It is important for medical center leaders to keep their strategic focus and their “eye on the ball” and not resort to simple reaction to the next national imperative. In order to keep that strategy in the forefront, it is critical that medical center leaders have access to accurate and complete data about their medical enterprise. Today, that data tends to be scattered and incomplete.

If you ask a medical school dean how their medical school ranks, you will probably get an answer derived from Blue Ridge rankings. What is a Blue Ridge ranking? The Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research (BRIMR) started publishing rankings of NIH funding for medical schools in 2006 and today ranks institutions, departments and even investigators in terms of their NIH awards. NIH used to publish its own list of rankings, but stopped in 2005. Blue Ridge rankings are widely used by medical schools, but are less frequently cited at the overall University level, where there are more diversified sources of research funding, like NSF, DOD, DOE, etc.

Measuring research output is complex and involves more than funding. It is noteworthy what one does with that funding like publishing papers, conducting clinical trials, securing patents, and spinning out companies. All of these varied functions should figure into how a medical school’s research is ranked. Only examining NIH funding seems a bit limited; important certainly, but limited.

Risks and opportunities

What visibility do medical leaders require into the risks and opportunities ahead that will drive their enterprise forward? What levers do leaders have to anticipate these risks and build on opportunities? Recruiting the right faculty, proactively addressing retention risks, investing resources into growth areas that serve key communities and build on existing strengths…all of these strategies require solid intelligence informed by peer comparisons and nuanced analysis.

Academic Analytics provides strategic intelligence for medical leaders to assess the broader range of activity that matters most for the future success of their enterprise. This suite of tools – Medical Insight – measures the comprehensive productivity of faculty, physician-scientists, and clinician-scientists, including publications, conference activity, books, book chapters, federal grant funding, citations, patents, honorific awards and clinical trials. What’s more is that collaborations are clearly visualized, not just within the medical disciplines but across campus and across the country.

What important questions can be posed and addressed using Medical Insight?

Who are our top scholars considering the comprehensive portfolio of scholarly productivity?
How does our medical center compare overall with our peers?
What areas of research do we excel in relative to our peers?
What strategic hires should we make that build on our areas of strength?
What honorific awards do our faculty qualify for?
How do we best retain our strong faculty?
Who are the rising stars amongst the faculty?

It is these types of questions that allow medical leadership to consider the full range of their impact and competitiveness among peers to chart their path forward in this challenging environment.

One key element of Medical Insight is that it provides peer to peer comparisons of medical units. The Department of Internal Medicine can be compared with other Departments of Internal Medicine nationwide, the Department of Neurology compared with other Departments of Neurology. The peer comparison can also be customized, allowing one to look at a medical center overall or specific departments as compared with national peers, regional peers (e.g., the Northeast) or peers within a state (e.g., Florida). Also, comparisons can be performed using specific metrics, such as grant funding or publications or patents between medical center peers or aspirational peers.

A unique feature of Medical Insight is the ability to look at an entire unit (department or division) and visualize the scholarly productivity of individual faculty by rank compared to their national counterparts. What questions might one ask with such data? How does our Psychiatry Department compare with other Ivy League Psychiatry Departments in terms of grant funding to full professors? Who are our early career faculty in a unit who are most productive and could be recruited elsewhere? What is the seniority of the faculty in the unit and how do we best prepare for any upcoming retirements?

The Medical Insight tool allows an unlimited amount of queries to be posed and has the data available to answer these important questions. No other tool is available to comprehensively assess the productivity of medical center faculty (basic science, clinical, and allied medical) with the precision and comparability of Medical Insight. In these times of uncertainty and challenge, focusing on strategic indicators of success is critically important.