Process Automation | News

U Cincinnati To Share Research Management Platform

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 09/27/10

The University of Cincinnati in Ohio will be tapping into a research management system already in use at its affiliate, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. The university will share the eResearch Portal platform from Click Commerce that Cincinnati Children's is using to automate processes related to grant applications, institutional review board (IRB), and institutional biosafety committee administration.

The institution currently has about $378 million in research funding. Access to the eResearch portal will help the university to automate much of the work done by its investigative teams and ancillary committees in their collaboration and management of IRB proposals. The software provides electronic creation, submission, and review of research projects.

The vendor's professional services division will also provide training and tools to help the university configure the system and improve its internal research management processes.

The "application sharing" aspects of this initiative required that the software be able to process data separately for each organization. According to the company, eResearch uses a security model that allows disparate user sites to implement a single system while permitting data sharing to the extent desired and restricting data access as confidentiality needs dictate.

Click Commerce said a similar arrangement is in place between the University of Southern California and the Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Those two entities have used a shared approach since 2003. "In every instance, each organization enjoys both complete autonomy in application deployment and economies of scale," said Nick Stier, company president.