We are very pleased to announce that DSFederal's Nancy Praskievicz, Project Manager at the NIH Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) program, received an Office of the Director Honor Award at an awards ceremony on November 15. The RCDC program provides consistent and transparent reporting to the public about NIH-funded research, including complete lists of all NIH-funded projects related to each category.
As Nancy explains, the Office of Research Information Systems (ORIS) teamed up with the Office of AIDS Research (OAR) to offer a solution that would improve data quality and streamline the user experience for how Institutes and Centers (ICs) code their AIDS projects. Because NIH's AIDS research funding is appropriated by Congress, all ICs throughout NIH must be able to accurately track and classify AIDS-related research funding requests. Before this year, ICs used the AIDS Research Information System (ARIS) database, an aging and difficult-to-use system that created confusion among users, leading to data quality issues.
Nancy worked as part of a team on a highly collaborative project between ORIS and OAR, Scientific Information Analysts (SIA), Health Science Administrators (HSA), program analysts, data analysts, developers, and requirements analysts, who worked together to develop an extension of the Manual Categorization System (MCS) module to accommodate all of these specialized AIDS-reporting needs, including a specialized planning portion where users can indicate to OAR how they would like to use funds. FY17 was the first year that AIDS reporting was mandatory in the MCS system, and data quality has improved with use of the new system.
This is Nancy's second award this month. We are very honored to continue supporting RCDC's mission and the larger mission of NIH, and extremely proud of Nancy and the DSFederal team at RCDC.