Literature Review: NIH Grant Application Software
Introduction
Applying for NIH grants and keeping track of them is a challenging experience, and the range of options for assistance, especially for NIH grants, is limited. The client, OmniSync, has had success with a SBIR grant application management software but has yet to capture the interest of research faculty that apply for NIH funding. Learning more about the academic NIH grant environment will help identify areas that a software management system would be beneficial for research faculty. The scope of this literature review includes sources that date back to 2011 through 2020. Some of the best insights came from sources that were used for internal discussions at research institutions. There aren’t a lot of peer-reviewed articles written about grant management software, but there is plenty of information about them buried in the websites of research institutions. Objectives for this literature review include understanding the user groups involved in the grant application process, the available resources, and next step for research.
Managing and tracking the NIH grant application comes with its own vocabulary and format guidelines. Every NIH grant application is a team effort, involving a variety of people with specific contributions. Due to the inherent team effort requirement of NIH grant applications, a software offering a single space to work on grants, track them through stages, and reuse content could be a significant time saver. With the feature of reusing content, the amount of time saving for a team could increase the longer they use the software. “Principal investigators' time ranged from 69.8 to 162.3 hr, research administrators' time ranged from 33.9 to 56.4 hr, and costs ranged from $4,784 to $13,512 per grant,” Kulage (2015). While this quote is specific to applying for NIH grants in the field of nursing, it confirms the client’s claim that there is room for time saving improvement and assistance for applying to NIH grants. Anything to reduce time spent on a grant application could be directly translated into a cost savings for the PI.
Definitions
There are several words and phrases that are unique to the NIH application process and are defined in this section from the NIH’s glossary. Biosketch is also known as a biographical sketch and is similar to a resume for a Doctor, it can only be 5 pages long, and the NIH provides a template to follow their requirements. Equipment is a required document in a NIH application, which means a list in the application are tangible property items that are $5,000 or more. Key Personnel is a phrase that includes the Principal Investigator (PI), and other individuals that make a scientific development contribution or help in the execution of the project in a significant way. Other Support is a document that includes all financial resources, Federal and non-Federal, that the PI receives from grants and contracts, this way the NIH knows how much time the PI has committed to other projects and if there is any potential conflict of interest. Principal Investigator (PI) is the individual that will direct the grant and will have full responsibility to ensure that everything is submitted on time, this include annual progress reports if the grant is funded (NIH, n.d.).
User Groups
A NIH application begins with a PI, as they articulate their research idea, they assemble a research team of colleagues, potentially, students and postdocs, and research assistants that will help carry out the research. The PI assembles a team based on their own knowledge of the work they plan to do if awarded funding. The length and scope of the grant project determines how many people a PI needs to assemble to successful carryout the research. The PI is responsible for writing a project summary, project narrative, facilities and other resources, equipment, specific aims, human subjects if applicable, or animal subjects if applicable (Johns Hopkins Medicine, 2020).
In addition to the science, the PI is also responsible for providing an updated Biosketch and obtaining Letters of Support from other faculty members, typically the Department’s Chair. The range of NIH grant types varies by experience of the PI. NIH K23 awards are for newer PIs designed to give them protected time for research, requiring 75% of their time and effort (NIH, n.d.). R01 and R21 NIH grants are the next level up and don’t require as much time and effort from the PI. Depending on the institution some newer PIs can leverage the experience and knowledge of colleagues that have been successful in receiving funding from the NIH.
PIs typically have an office at their institution where they work with colleagues and support staff. Based on personal work experience with PIs at Johns Hopkins University, they also work on grant applications at home due to the time intensive nature of the grant process. PIs apply for grants with the goal of innovation and publishing impactful results but also to support their salary expense at the institution that employs them. For new PIs there are sometimes salary protection years where the Department will cover their salary as they apply for grants, from my experience these decisions are based on office politics and are never formally discussed or published. Regardless if a PI has salary protection or not, they feel an incredible pressure to get NIH funding, without an NIH K award it is hard for PIs to grow their research career.
At Johns Hopkins University, PIs currently use Microsoft Word, Excel, and an Internal Shared Drive, maintained by the IT Department, to create and share the required grant application documents with other team members. Email is the preferred communication software for discussing the grant application, but only because there isn’t an available substitute. They also have to interact with NIH’s software Assist which is detailed in the Competitors section of this paper. Each NIH funding opportunity has set deadlines for applications, some follow multi-month cycles, which directly impacts when PIs are working on their grant application. For example, the standard due dates for a NIH R01 grant is spread across three cycles every year: February 5th, June 5th, and October 5th (NIH, n.d.). The most common pain point for PIs is not having enough time to work on their grant applications. Their urgency trickles down to their team which makes saving time anyway possible a top priority (Tregoning & McDermott, 2020).
Co-PIs are other faculty members that agree to assist the PI with their grant if funded. They have to provide an updated Biosketch and Other Support page as well and may be responsible for writing part of the science sections in the grant application depending on the PIs research knowledge. Some PIs will enlist Postdocs and Students to be part of the research team. These team members may be asked by the PI to assist with some of the science writing, but it is the PIs responsibility to review all content before submitting the application, as it will be their name that is attached to the application.
Research Assistants and Research Program Coordinators are a common user group that are also involved in the NIH grant application experience, although they don’t have a full picture of the application process. If the grant is funded, they can be responsible for a variety of research activities, including recruitment, lab testing, professors. One common limitation is that they aren’t allowed to see other people’s salary, which brings up the need for permissions as a setting feature for successful grant management software. At Johns Hopkins University, the research staff does not have access to the grant management software, that solely falls onto Administrative employees, so a common pain point for this user group is not knowing what stage the grant application is in, and who is holding up the process (Johns Hopkins Medicine, 2020).
One subgroup of Administrative employees includes the Grants & Contracts Analyst user group, which was my role at Johns Hopkins University for two years; Financial or Budget Analyst are similar titles for this group. One of the first steps for this user group is to build the budget and make adjustments based on communications with the PI. Additionally, they are responsible for gathering all the required documents from the PI and Co-PIs. As the documents come in, they look for any errors such as incorrect formatting and content that goes over page limits (NIH, n.d.). If any errors are discovered, they notify the PI, requesting revisions where necessary. Pain points here stem from the time intensive nature of formatting each document to meet the NIH standards (Johns Hopkins Medicine, 2020).
The next step the Analyst performs is uploading the document NIH’s software Assist. This software has built in validation checks, and once the checks are cleared the analyst submits the application to the institution’s grant management software. The software that Johns Hopkins University uses is called Coeus, which was developed by MIT in the 1990s to streamline grant management (Tufts, 2014). The Analyst notifies the Department and/or Institution Reviewers that the application is ready for inspection.
The size of the institution determines how many reviewers are involved in this part of the process. Johns Hopkins University requires each Department to review applications and then a centralized team, Office of Research Administration, performs a final review before sending the application off to the NIH. Other institutions may have a different name for this team, such as Sponsored Programs Office at Pennsylvania State University (Gerin & Kapelewski, 2011). Regardless of the name, the goal of the team is to ensure the application has the best chance at receiving funding. If the final reviewers notice any issues in the application, they notify the Analyst and request necessary revisions (Johns Hopkins Medicine, 2020).
Available Resources
As previously mentioned, the grant tracking software, Coeus, has been around since the 1990s. Unfortunately, Johns Hopkins University, uses a version of Coeus that looks like software from the 1990s, so there is room for improvement even at the top NIH-funded institution (Philippidis, 2020). Coeus doesn’t have any NIH resources built in, it is purely a tracking system. The status of grants is not easy to discern without extensive Coeus experience. As a result, it is common for Coeus access to be reserved for the Grant Analyst and the Institution Reviewers. Johns Hopkins University subscribes to this utilization which excludes the PIs, Students, and Research Assistants that contribute to the grant’s application. As a result, a digital space for everyone to collaborate on a grant application continues to be a need.
Workspace is a product of Grants.gov, debuted in 2015, and is aimed at being a digital collaborative space for all team members working on a Federal grant (Grants.gov, 2016). The most significant benefit of this software is that it is free, while its largest weakness is that only Federal grants can be tracked in the software. Additional strengths of Workspace include the ability to add remove participants, copying previous workspaces, fill in webforms, download PDFs, reuse previous forms, and Allows permission protection (Grants.gov, n.d.).
The team working on Workspace appears to be taking feedback from their users, as evidenced by receiving a FedHealthIT Innovation award in 2019 (Grants.gov, 2019). This is important for competitors to take note of because Workspace has direct connection to NIH’s Assist software. However, the Workspace software is not indented to support non-Federal grants making it an incomplete solution for institutions that apply to a variety of sponsors (Grants.gov, n.d.). While Grants.gov Workspace is a legitimate management option, the institutions that utilize the software are likely doing so because it is free and wouldn’t have money to invest in OmniSync’s products.
The top 50 institutions of NIH funding account for 58% of total NIH funding (NIAID, 2020). Institutions that don’t have a strong history of receiving NIH funding could benefit from assistance. Aside from the Workspace software, The NIH does provide helpful resources directly on their website such as a guide for new PIs working on their K award applications (Brock & Bouvet, 2014). However, that resource is buried in the NIH’s subsite for the National Center for Biotechnology Information, NBCI. Given the wide range of subsections within the NIH’s website it can be an overwhelming experience, especially for new PIs (NIH, n.d.).
The NIH has a free software, Assist, for sponsored research applications that is more modern looking than Coeus. Once you complete the application in Assist you can download a PDF copy and upload that to Coeus so that all of your grant applications, including sponsors outside of the NIH, can be tracked in one place. This is a critical issue for institutions that apply to grants from a variety of sponsors, NIH’s Assist software is exclusive for NIH grants, and Coeus leaves a lot to be desired.
The company that properly addressed this need is Kuali, which formed in 2004, with the mission to develop financial systems for higher education institutions. They pride themselves on being created by higher education members to serve all higher education institutions (Tufts, 2014). Their 2008 open-source software, Kuali Coeus, is directly aimed at streamlining the sponsored research process. Kuali Coeus has all of the features that Grant.gov’s Workspace offers and much more. One of the primary strengths with Kuali Coeus is that being an open-source product means that IT Departments at institutions can customize the product to be exactly what they need. As future applications are added to an institution, integration points can be developed so that all of the applications work together (USC, n.d.). This is also mentioned in video testimonies from a variety of user groups representing a nationwide range of universities including some of the top NIH-funded institutions such as the University of California San Diego and Weill Cornell Medical College (Kuali, n.d.). As a result, Kuali Coeus allows institutions to fuse the modern usability of NIH’s Assist with the full tracking and management capability of Coeus (ORIS, 2019).
Even though Kuali Coeus has been available since 2008, Johns Hopkins University is still using Coeus from the 1990s. Johns Hopkins University is heavily focused on research and have a lot of internal resources through their Office of Research Administration that provide trainings on the grant application process (Johns Hopkins Medicine, 2020). The strength of using their resource portal is evident in their continued success in receiving NIH funding. They have a system that works, enabling them to receive $722 million from the NIH in 2020 alone (Philippidis, 2020).
Additionally, the expense of training employees on new software at Hopkins would be substantial. Another issue is that PIs are constantly submitting grant application year-round, so there can’t be a long transition period for a new software. A software change of this magnitude for a large institution can take years to implement. These points are highlighted in a presentation of Kuali Coeus at Johns Hopkins University, which occurred in 2015 (ORIS, 2015). As of June 2019, Kuali Coeus implementation and rollout at Johns Hopkins University was still being discussed with no specific deliverable date provided (ORIS, 2019). The Office of Research Administration has been discussing the replacement of Coeus for four years and counting; this also highlights the fact that individual PIs do not have a large say in the institution’s choice of grant management software. Even as the top NIH-funded institution, Johns Hopkins University recognizes it is time to upgrade from a 1990s software.
Conclusion
Kuali Coeus is expanding its client base and securing Johns Hopkins University will likely convince other institutions follow their lead. As their growth continues their software will become the new standard, unless other companies can come up with competitive alternatives. For OmniSync to be successful with their TurboGrant project, extensive research into Kuali Coeus will be necessary. Open-source software is a defining feature of Kuali Coeus that OmniSync doesn’t currently offer with TurboSBIR. Deciding on what kind of software company they want to be will determine how closely they compete with Kuali Coeus. One area for further research is the collaborative functionality of Kuali Coeus, to identify any gaps that OmniSync could fill.
User research on Kuali Coeus would be crucial to identifying opportunities for competitors, but that would require inside connections with institutions that use Kuali Coeus. Finding additional literature, i.e. peer-reviewed articles, about this topic is challenging in part because communication between grant application software companies and research institutions are largely private. OmniSync is relatively young compared to Kuali, therefore targeting smaller research institutions should be their next step. This path would help them build a client base that would prepare them to take on the large institutions, and possibly converting institutions that use Kuali Coeus. Additional research would involve investigating which software each top NIH-funded institution is currently using and start prioritizing which ones to target.
References
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