|
The Health Research Alliance (HRA) is a national consortium of not-for-profit, non-governmental funders of health research and training. The Alliance existed informally for several years before it was incorporated in late 2005, and is tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code as a 509(a)(2) public charity. Headquartered in Research Triangle Park, NC, the Alliance seeks to help funders improve their effectiveness by providing opportunities for them to share best practices, policies and procedures; and by providing them with an opportunity to speak with one voice on issues important to health research and training. To improve communication and to foster collaboration among member and other organizations, the Alliance sponsors two Members’ Meetings each year as well as a biennial national conference open to all nonprofit, non-governmental funders of health research and training. Several working groups meet by conference call and email throughout the year to move projects forward in the area of grants administration, evaluation, translational philanthropy, and further development of the gHRAsp database. For more information on HRA see www.healthra.org. Purpose of the “Grants in the Health Research Alliance Shared Portfolio” (gHRAsp) Database
The purpose of the “Grants in the Health Research Alliance Shared Portfolio” database, or gHRAsp, is to consolidate grant information among non-governmental, not-for-profit funders of health research and training in order to provide evidence for strategic planning and decision making. Membership in the Health Research Alliance is composed of voluntary health agencies, private foundations, and disease-specific funders. Over time, data from gHRAsp should illuminate the types of research funded by Alliance members as well as quantifying their level of support for health research and training. HRA member organizations will eventually be able to use this database to help quantify the impact of their programs and to track the long-term career progress of funded individuals. Information from the database should be useful in identifying emerging trends and opportunities, as well as gaps and unmet needs.
The need for this database was one of the early goals that encouraged the creation of the Health Research Alliance. Funding organizations were perennially frustrated by the inability to quantify the important and unique contributions of their sector to the advancement of biomedical and health research. The development and maintenance of the database directly address the Health Research Alliance goal of providing information about the research supported by not-for-profit, non-governmental funders of health research and training. Brief Overview of gHRAsp gHRAsp is an online, searchable database of health research awards made by not-for-profit, non-governmental funding organizations that are members of the Health Research Alliance. It is analogous to the CRISP (Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects) database maintained by the National Institutes of Health for governmental health research awards. HRA member organizations jointly populate the gHRAsp data repository with their individual and institutional award information after grants have been awarded. Data imports are accomplished via a flexible interface allowing each organization to move specific information from their locally-controlled software to the gHRAsp database by means of manual entry or by the use of an Excel file. Access to the gHRAsp application and its data is handled in a secure manner, preventing unwanted use. In a role-based security system, each user is assigned an individual username and password in order to enter, modify and view data in the application. The database was developed with support and leadership provided by the American Cancer Society. In 2008, Innolyst was selected to implement, maintain and provide further enhancements to the database. Because one of the early goals in developing the database was to facilitate analysis of grants from not-for-profit funders within the broader context of governmental and industry funding, and because all HRA member organizations publicize their awards, the non-private fields in gHRAsp will eventually be released to the public ResearchCrossroads database (www.researchcrossroads.com), also operated by Innolyst. |
