Leadership effort in professional radiology associations

Professional associations advocate for their members' interests; provide forums for education, training, and certification; and support domain-specific research and development efforts. The purpose of this study was to determine the amount of resources devoted to the leadership committees of professional radiology associations in the United States. Internet research was conducted to identify general, subspecialty, and special interest radiology associations, followed by a survey that focused on the number of committees and the average number of members per committee for each association. Established or published benchmarks were used to calculate committee-related annual expenditures from the survey data. Two hundred forty full-time equivalents, or nearly $100 million, are devoted to leadership activities within radiology associations each year. This is equivalent to approximately 1% of the professional income in radiology. These resources have enabled individual radiologists and societies to cooperate on important initiatives. More research should be conducted on other specialties or industries to provide comparable data on the optimal investment in the leadership effort.