Monthly Archives: August 2009

Grant Central is Here!

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On Thursday, our team released Grant Central, a tool to help life sciences researchers find grant opportunities, identify new collaborators, and manage the grant application process. It’s one of the things, along with Clickframes, that we’ve been working on for most of 2009.

Here are the highlights:

  • Search through all US government grant opportunities for life sciences, including all HHS agencies, (including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control) as well as the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation. Searches can be by keyword or award size.
  • Comment on grants, enabling a conversation across the Harvard community.
  • Query the Harvard faculty Profiles database for new collaborators and invite them to participate in a grant project.
  • Manage grant projects using the aptly-named “Projects” module. Projects allows you to track due dates, tasks and documents, as well as maintaining an online discussion forum for your grant project. Grant Central also allows users to manage their NIH Biosketches, Other Support Forms and Lab Information documents -  no more chasing them down the day before the proposal is due!

We’ll post more about it over the next week or two. You won’t be able to see the whole application if you don’t have a Harvard Medical School eCommons account, but you can still use the grant and collaborator search engines.

And if you’re interested in Grant Central for your own institution, drop us a note. The application was developed as part of Harvard Catalyst, the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center – if your institution has a CTSC, you can get Grant Central too.

Yes, it’s been a little quiet around here…

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Summertime, and all that. However, the big reason has been the impending release of a pretty major project we’ve been working on for the last several months. We took a couple of government databases, some existing systems at Harvard Medical School, the latest lightweight, web based productivity tools, put them all in a blender, and kept the really good bits.

It’s not available to the public yet, but we’re planning for later in August – development is done, and we’re in integration and scalability testing right now. If you do academic research, you’re going to like this this one.

In the meantime, blogging to intensify.

Future of Google Health

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John Moore at Chilmark Research asks today if Google Health is irrelevant. I’m re-blogging it because I agree with him. Microsoft is easily the leading player in broad audience Personal Health Record platforms. That doesn’t mean their product is ideal – it’s certainly not – but they’ve been improving it steadily and have integrated it with a very cohesive strategy aimed at engaging with the healthcare industry as a whole. Google hasn’t done that.

One take-away I had from the Microsoft Health Solutions Group conference in June (besides one heck of an airplane-acquired infection) was how tightly Microsoft is linking Amalga UIS – its hospital intelligence/data warehousing offering – with HealthVault. Amalga is the back-door – hospitals will make the data integration investments because of bottom-line and quality improvement benefits that are realized by UIS. But once that work is done, integrating with HealthVault is just flipping a switch. Microsoft has allocated its R&D money accordingly.

Google, on the other hand, still strikes me as simply dallying in healthcare. They’ve done some good work in focused healthcare search, but that’s pretty much where it ends. I completely agree with John’s statement that Google has gotten disproportionate attention simply because it’s Google. I’m not really inclined to start trying to take down the myth of Google here, but it’s safe to say that the company isn’t omnicompetent. From very personal experience, it was quite difficult to get projects in PHR off the ground during the six months after Google Health leaked but before it launched. There was a huge chilling effect – everybody wanted to wait and see what Google would do.