J. Arliss Pollock Award and Memorial Lecture

PURPOSE: The Pollock Award recognizes exceptional leadership and commitment to medicine in the area of socioeconomics and health policy at a national level.

HISTORY: The Pollock Award and Memorial lecture is held in honor of J. Arliss Pollock, MD a pioneering neuroradiologist who led ASNR economic and health policy efforts for fifteen years.  Dr. Pollock’s career was grounded in the clinical practice of neuroradiology.  Notably, he was one of the first doctors on the West Coast to receive a neuroradiology fellowship from the National Institutes of Health and utilize cerebral angiography in community practice. Dr. Pollock served as the founding chair of the precursor to the ASNR Health Policy Committee, then called the Clinical Practice Committee from 1992 until 2004. This was indeed visionary as such a committee was highly unusual for a society the size of ASNR at that time.  He was also a founding member of the Western Neuroradiological Society and served as its president in 1974.

In 2001, Dr. Pollock received the Gold Medal from the ASNR–our highest award. The neuroradiology community is indebted to Dr. Pollock for his personal efforts that helped result in the ASNR taking a lead position in the areas of socioeconomics and health policy at a national level; a position that continues to be recognized into the present day.  Dr. Pollock led the ASNR health policy efforts at the AMA CPT Editorial Panel Advisory Committee and the Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC). These highly influential multi-specialty committees create codes for new technologies and procedures and develop values that set the physician reimbursement rates. He was a remarkable consensus-builder amongst related societies in helping to craft codes for Vertebral Augmentation, epidural, angiography, MEG, functional MR and facet injections, as well as expanding the MRI and MRA code set  In recognizing Dr. Pollock’s exceptional leadership and commitment to developing the health policy and economic areas of interest at ASNR and thus his service to the field of neuroradiology, we dedicate a health policy lecture each year at the annual meeting and confer an award on the person who delivers the oration.

ABOUT THE NOMINATION PROCESS: The Pollock Award and Memorial Lecture is selected annually by physician leaders in Healthcare Policy and asked to present, as a keynote, in a dedicated policy session at the ASNR Annual Meeting.

To view the past recipients of the J. Arliss Pollock Award, click here.