New eRA Program Module (PGM) functionality added in August and planned for November improve Program Officials’ ability to search, access, report, and perform transactions on grants in their portfolios. The PGM, which debuted last spring, has matured into a coherent, intuitive Web interface that enables POs to do their work using the paperless business processes mandated by Congress.

At sign-on, the system provides access to the PO’s own portfolio of grant applications and awards. The November deployment adds Program assistant and Program analyst roles and grants all users read access to all portfolios at NIH. This is a step toward accommodating the real-world practices and interactions of the Program community.

Enhancements implemented in the summer release greatly facilitate access to real-time grant information, an important PGM project goal. From a new “search” tab, users can search by PI name and/or grant number. The grants in a portfolio are divided according to position in the grant cycle (e.g., pending SRG, pre-Council, post-Council) with the ability to filter/sort the grant lists by fiscal year, Council date, program class code and subprojects. Sort criteria can be saved for future use and the resulting hitlist exported to Excel. In addition, each grant displayed on the screen links to its eRA Grant Folder, grant Snapshot report, Program checklists, Program approval (sign-off and notes), PO notes and concerns requiring attention. PGM offers canned reports (PO Worksheet, Master List of Applications, SRG Agenda and Order of Review); in the future, users will have the ability to create customized reports when the module is integrated with Web Query Tool.