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The development of the Electronic Scientific Portfolio Assistant (e-SPA) grew out of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' (NIAID) need to better correlate the research it
funds with public health outcomes. The portfolio management software is now a NIH Enterprise
application and is in use by ¾ of the NIH Institutes and Centers. e-SPA is built using Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA), the Microsoft .NET Framework, Microsoft Windows SmartClient technology,
SQL Server and Oracle.
The development of e-SPA grew out of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases' (NIAID) need to better correlate the research it funds with public health outcomes.
e-SPA is able to do so by providing an interface that builds and evaluates portfolios of grants.
Recently, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has started to merge
the NIEHS Portfolio Analysis Tool (PAT), also developed by Discovery Logic, into e-SPA.
To fulfill its public health mission, NIAID needed to develop a process to analyze R&D
portfolios and correlate the research it funds with public health outcomes. Under contract
to NIAID, Discovery Logic set out to develop an electronic Scientific Portfolio Assistant
(e-SPA) to help NIAID program officers and institute leadership manage research project
portfolios.
Over the years, it has been almost impossible to provide quantitative metrics for portfolios
of grants and R&D contracts. Although NIH depends on numerous review panels for many essential
functions, it had never developed a system to analyze all grants and contracts quickly and
systematically. It had been limited to a manual process of reviewing a few grants every few
years, at considerable expense of labor and with few quantitative indicators. The difficulty
is compounded by the magnitude of NIH's extramural grant program, which disburses ~$19 billion
a year in support of over 50,000 research projects at research institutions around the world.
NIH had experimented with publication counts and other bibliometric indicators.
However, these measures alone provided only a portion of the needed information
on project outcomes, particularly when research was interdisciplinary. Discovery
Logic saw immediately that if the NIH grants database could be related to data in
ScienceWire, including patents and publication citations, it would become immensely
more useful and powerful.
During a proof of concept phase in 2006, Discovery Logic and NIAID found it was possible
to provide real-time outcomes data on scientific portfolios
through enhanced processing and analysis of ScienceWire data.
Discovery Logic and NIAID launched the e-SPA prototype system in December 2007.
e-SPA enables program officers to analyze portfolios of projects by evaluating the
database of grants and building scatter charts, histograms, networks and other graphs
to visualize results of grantee activities. While no single indicator provides a definitive
assessment of a project's quality or merits, we found that automating the integration of
performance metrics across multiple categories was an important step in developing objective
assessments. Drawing on ScienceWire databases made it possible to “see” outcomes and evaluate
success of funding initiatives. As one manager notes, “It just keeps on going in all directions.”
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