When HHS was selected to implement the Section 5 Pilot of the 2014 Data Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act), they sought technical assistance from DSFederal. The DATA Act’s Section 5 Pilot addresses the lack of common data standards across the universe of Federal programs, and authorizes a Government-wide effort to identify unifying commonalities, with the ultimate goal of creating and enforcing a shared data vocabulary. The Common Data Element Repository (CDER) Library advances this objective, by providing a reliable and accurate source of grants data related to performance and government spending. We helped HHS to achieve its compliance goals, through two efforts:
Development of the CDER Library Web application: CDER Library is a source of grant-related data elements and attributes used throughout the Federal government. CDER Library stores, maintains, and shares standardized data elements with public and government stakeholders. We developed a web application that offers role-based access and a range of capabilities including search and analysis, customized reporting, and status tracking of data collection forms and data elements.
Analysis and harmonization of data housed in the Grants.gov, Grants Centers of Excellence databases, and Agency forms: We also perform analysis and harmonization of data housed in the Grants.gov and Grants Centers of Excellence databases and across hundreds of Agency-specific forms used to manage Federal grants—we have harmonized and standardized thousands of records scattered throughout all of these databases and forms.
The DATA Act team recently recognized three key team members: DSFederal’s VP of Management Solutions, Dianne Welsh; Director of Enterprise Solutions, Thiagarajan Prakash; and our Lead Data Analyst, Echo Wang. Dianne, Prakash, and Echo were delighted to receive DATA Act mugs imprinted with team members’ names. DSFederal was also pleased to see a recent post on the Grants.gov Community Blog, which discussed the data harmonization effort and a DSFederal-produced video that explains data harmonization and its importance to Federal grants programs. Read additional Community Blog posts to learn more about grants and DATA Act implementation efforts.
DSFederal is dedicated to serving our customers and making the world a better place through our work, and we are honored to be recognized by the agencies we serve.