Inside eRA, February 6, 2004 (Volume 5, Issue 1)

eRA Prepares to Expand e-Application Pilot

The eRA team, benefiting from the experience of the October/November electronic grants pilot, is preparing for the March 1 receipt date. NIH will accept a limited number of e-applications from service providers for Type 2 competing continuation research grants. The pilot will be limited to simple grants with modular budgets.

Thirteen e-applications submitted for the October/November due dates have been verified by the grantees, successfully processed through the Receipt and Referral office and assigned to a study section or initial review group through the eRA system. Two of the original 15 applicants decided to use their paper applications and opted out of the pilot. Members of the eRA team are meeting with scientific review administrators to brief them on the new electronic process and to request feedback from reviewers at the end of the review meetings. The 13 applications will be tracked closely through peer review, council, and possibly award to ensure that all processing runs smoothly.

The electronic Competing Grant Application Process (CGAP) software will be upgraded in February. Based on lessons learned from the first pilot, the CGAP team will add a validation service to enable submitters to perform a “test run.” The test submission will undergo all the business rule checks required for NIH to generate a database record and a grant image. Principal investigators (PIs) and service providers will be able to correct errors or update personal profile data before resubmitting the “live” and final e-application. The validation service should minimize the data discrepancy problems that were encountered in the first pilot. 

To further facilitate data checks and reduce mismatched error conditions, NIH also is adding a Web service to retrieve some key administrative information. This will allow the PI and service provider to compare the person information in the Commons with data in the application image generated by the NIH.

The eRA team also has improved documentation for grantees and service providers and supplementary instructions for applicants. Terms and conditions and procedures for submitting applications are available online. In addition, NIH has prepared a tool kit for service providers and institutions with instructions on establishing a system-to-system interface with the eRA Exchange. (See the NIH Partnership development information page.) The tool kit also documents NIH validation rules and explains how to handle error messages. An increasing number of institutions and commercial software providers are exploring the system-to-system method.

NIH Opens eSNAP Pilot to FDP

Effective January 1, 2004, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) invites all Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) members to participate in its NIH electronic Research Administration (eRA) electronic Streamlined Non-competing Award Process (eSNAP) pilot. eSNAP, a component of the Commons, enables extramural grantees to submit an electronic version of the SNAP Type 5 (non-competing) progress report through a Web interface. 

Currently, 46 of the 780 organizations registered in the Commons are authorized to submit eSNAP progress reports. Since the start of the eSNAP pilot in November 2003, these users have transmitted a total of 762 eSNAPs to the NIH. To access the eSNAP Web interface, institutions and users first must enroll in the Commons. Once an institution is registered, an authorized business official needs to request eSNAP functionality from the NIH eRA Commons Helpdesk.

As part of the eSNAP pilot, NIH is testing potential changes to certain progress report business processes. Therefore, before granting eSNAP access, NIH requires that the participating institutions sign an up-front agreement, promising to test these new business processes.

 One significant difference in the pilot involves the reporting of human subjects Institutional Review Board (IRB) and vertebrate animal Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) approval dates. In the electronic process, these dates are not captured at the time of submission. Instead, participating grantees agree to provide this data on a retrospective quarterly basis. NIH will provide each institution with a spreadsheet listing all progress reports submitted via eSNAP that involve human or animal subjects. The institution will be responsible for entering the approval date for each project and returning the spreadsheet to NIH by the specified due date. The immediate goal of this data collection is to continue to assure full compliance. Once data has been gathered and analyzed from a larger population of participating grantees, NIH expects the results to support a permanent change to the business process, i.e., eliminating routine reporting of approval dates for SNAP progress reports.

NIH extramural staff and Commons users are welcome to visit the eRA Commons demonstration site at https://commonsdemo.era.nih.gov/commons-demo/index.jsp to simulate the entire eSNAP process from initiation through final submission. An eSNAP users guide also is available online.

For more information on the eSNAP pilot, see NIH Guide Notice NOT-OD-04-024, issued on February 5, 2004.

Update on Implementation of New Password Policy

eRA completed the implementation of its new password policy for usernames beginning with D–L on January 13. On the same date, all link accounts also were migrated into the “aging profile.” The next group (usernames beginning with M - P) are scheduled for February 11; the last group (usernames beginning with Q - Z) for March 10.

Last November, eRA began enforcing a more stringent password policy to reduce the risk of unauthorized access to test, development, staging, and production servers and databases. The new eRA policy, which includes the requirement to change passwords at least every 180 days, is consistent with NIH password policy and guidelines of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The only implementation problems have been compatibility issues between special characters and the eRA reports server. Some users with usernames beginning with “*” or ending with “—“ have encountered errors running reports from eRA applications. Although choosing a different password circumvents the problem, technical staff is investigating other solutions.

eRA Awards New Contracts for Software Development

eRA has awarded design, development and maintenance contracts to three vendors who will compete for individual task orders. The three companies are Northrop Grumman Information Technology (NGIT), Science Application International Corporation (SAIC), and AC Technologies (ACT). These contractors will provide services formerly performed solely by NGIT.

ACT recently won the task order for system maintenance; Requests for Quotes (RFQs) currently are out for bids for iEdison and Datamart support. According to the new procurement structure, the eRA planning team will create a statement of work (SOW) as the need for support arises. The SOW, defining the work and terms of the vendor/NIH relationship, will be combined into a task-order requirements package and published as an RFQ open for bids from the three contractors.

NGIT, headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, is one of the nation’s largest technology providers with annual sales exceeding $4 billion and 23,000 employees worldwide. NGIT is partnering with Silicon Spirit and Global Solutions on the eRA contract. Founded by a small group of scientists in 1969, SAIC now ranks as the largest employee-owned research and engineering firm in the nation. SAIC and its subsidiaries have more than 42,000 employees with offices in more than 150 cities worldwide. Altum and Turner Consulting Group are SAIC’s partners on the eRA project. ACT, the third eRA awardee, is a rapidly growing 8(a) information technology company serving the U.S. Postal Service, the Department of Commerce, the Veterans Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other organizations in the public and private sectors. ACT will team with Booz Allen Hamilton on eRA activities.

eRA awarded contracts in four other areas during the fall of 2003: 

Direct questions about eRA contracts to Donna Frahm at frahmd@mail.nih.gov.

ORS to Administer Grant Imaging and CD Production

Effective this calendar year, the organizational responsibility for grant application imaging and compact disk (CD) production has transferred from the Office of the Director (OD)/eRA to the Office of Research Services (ORS), Division of Medical Arts and Printing Services (DMAPS). This change has implications for the level of financial support required from institutes and centers (ICs).

Since January 2002, costs for scanning grant applications have been charged back to the ICs by ORS via the Service and Supply Fund. However, the costs of converting scanned grant applications to PDF, bookmarking, uploading the images to the eRA database, and producing CDs have been assumed by OD. In addition, ICs were spared the costs of planning, developing, and piloting imaging technology while they explored changes to their business practices to benefit from the new electronic products and services.

Beginning January 2002, NIH began production imaging of all grant applications received through the Center for Scientific Review (CSR). Since then, grant application images have been available online, and CDs have been widely used in the peer review process. During calendar year 2003, more than 64,000 grant applications were scanned, converted to PDF, bookmarked, and uploaded to the eRA database. More than 1,600 study sections ordered 49,000 CDs to facilitate their peer review meetings. These CDs contain images of grant applications assigned to the study section, related prior summary statements, relevant Program Announcements (PAs) and Requests for Applications (RFAs), and other useful material.

To implement the transfer of responsibility, ORS/DMAPS will contact appropriate IC offices with new procedures, charge-back rates, and other important information. ICs have the option to download grant application images directly from eRA and produce their own CDs.

For more information, contact Michael Cox at coxm@mail.nih.gov.

eRA Bids Farewell to George Stone

George Stone, Ph.D., whose vision and leadership made Interagency Edison and the eRA Commons a reality, has departed from the government to pursue outside interests. During his eleven years at the NIH, Dr. Stone lobbied for improving research grants administration through business-process reengineering and the use of information technology. He was a vocal supporter of the extramural community, an active participant in professional organizations, and a dedicated contributor to NIH outreach activities. “His commitment and loyalty will be greatly missed,” stated Dr. John McGowan, former eRA project manager.

In 1997, Dr. Stone and his Edison Invention Reporting Team won the prestigious Hammer Award. This honor was bestowed by the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, Vice President Gore’s initiative to recognize federal employees and their partners whose work results in a government that works better and costs less. Dr. Stone and his colleagues were the creators of Interagency Edison (iEdison), a central user interface on the Internet for invention reporting. Currently 500 grantee and contractor organizations and 20 federal agencies use iEdison.

Dr. Stone also was the driving force behind the eRA Commons, a virtual meeting place on the Web where NIH extramural grantee organizations, grantees, and the public receive and transmit information pertaining to the administration of biomedical and behavioral research. Under his leadership since 1995, the eRA Commons has matured into a state-of-the-art Web interface where registered, authorized grantees are able to review the status of their applications and awards, create and maintain accounts, submit progress reports and financial status reports, and create new trainee appointments, and where registered peer reviewers are able to submit critiques and initial scores. 

Throughout his career at the NIH, Dr. Stone worked very closely with the grantee community to respond to user requirements. To this end, he formed the Commons Working Group (CWG), comprising representatives from 18 grantee institutions, who play a critical role in shaping, evaluating and fine-tuning new eRA Web-based Commons applications. According to Jerry Stuck, executive director of the Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP), “George Stone truly defines what it means to be an eRA advocate. He represents the highest ideals of the government-university partnership.”

eRA and the NIH Roadmap

The eRA team has begun assessing its role in support of the NIH Roadmap, which will be implemented in FY2004. Conceived by NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni and developed with input from more than 300 nationally recognized leaders in academia, industry, government and the public, the Roadmap provides a framework of priorities for sponsoring research in the 21^st century.

At eRA’s third annual symposium last spring, Dr. Ronald N. Germain, deputy chief of NIAID’s laboratory of immunology, explained that major advances in medicine are not likely to come from small laboratories with one principal investigator. “Rather, larger teams comprising expert biologists, computer programmers, mathematicians, engineers, chemists and others are needed to collect and assemble the vast amount of data into predictive models of biological behavior.” The NIH Roadmap responds to this new trend in biological research by seeking to deepen the understanding of biological systems, stimulate interdisciplinary and public/private sector collaboration, and reshape clinical research to accelerate medical discovery and improve health worldwide. These goals correspond to the three core themes of the Roadmap: New Pathways to Discovery, Research Teams of the Future, and Re-engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise.

Undoubtedly, NIH will need to establish new and more complex funding mechanisms to achieve Roadmap goals. In particular, the tracking of a widening network of co-investigators and key personnel will impact eRA’s responsibility. The eRA Project already has introduced new efficiencies that speed up the grant-making enterprise and reduce the administrative burden on researchers. Electronic applications and the Internet-assisted review process are expected to shorten the time from receipt to award by two months.

The Roadmap plan will be funded at a level of about $130 million in FY2004 but expected to reach a total of $2.1 billion over the next 5 years (see chart). All NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs) have made a corporate decision to create a common pool of resources to achieve Roadmap initiatives. ICs already have issued numerous Requests for Applications (RFAs) in support of Roadmap objectives. See the NIH Guide for details.

For more information, go to the NIH Roadmap Web site at http://www.nihroadmap.nih.gov/.

Zerhouni Forms Working Group to Oversee NIH IT Management

NIH Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni has formed an enterprise Information Technology Working Group (ITWG) to provide governance and oversight on NIH IT management issues. The new governance structure replaces the IT Board of Governors, NIH’s decision-making body for the past five years. 

The function of the ITWG, as defined in its charter approved by the NIH Steering Committee on December 18, 2003, is to advise the NIH director, the NIH Steering Committee and the NIH Chief Information Officer (CIO) on IT management issues, focusing on IT principles, infrastructure strategies, architecture, business application needs, and investment priorities. The ITWG currently comprises the following members, appointed by the NIH director for terms not to exceed three years. Deputy directors do not vote on funding issues impacting their own areas of responsibility.

A new Extramural IT Steering Committee, whose purview includes eRA and all IC grants and contract management systems, will report to the ITWG. Dr. Louise Ramm, deputy director, NCRR, will chair the steering committee, and Dr. Norka Ruiz Bravo, deputy director for Extramural Research, will be the program official on the committee.

The recent restructuring of NIH IT governance carries out the centralization and standardization agenda of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). To this end, other HHS initiatives include a unified financial management system, the consolidation of grants management under NIH’s eRA and the Administration for Children and Families’ GATES systems, and the requirement that all infrastructure IT services within an operational division (OPDIV) report to the OPDIV CIO. NIH’s new IT hierarchy also is consistent with the Office of Management and Budget’s e-Government program.