Collaboration Protected Time and Cost-Sharing Model

Goals

• Integrate Biostatistics into research fabric of VU School of Medicine
• Develop long-term collaborative relationships; develop statistical scientists instead of statistical consultants
• Provide continuity that will allow biostatisticians to learn enough about biomedical research areas to be effective co-investigators
• Increase NIH grant funding by maintaining grant development capabilities
• Help organize research teams that plan in advance and submit better grant proposals that have a higher likelihood of funding
• Always have someone with available FTE who can be listed on a grant application
• Be able to respond to RFPs and RFAs with short lead times, and to training grant opportunities
• Hire new faculty and staff in proportion to anticipated grant funding
• Foster research in clinical departments, in ways other than just grant development
  • participate in meetings
  • work with fellows and residents
  • improve research methodology skills of faculty
  • help develop new clinical investigators

The Problem

• Easy to fund biostatisticians on grant proposals
• Difficult to hire ahead of funding
• Difficult to maintain enough unallocated percent efforts to collaborate on new ideas
• Moderately large clinical grant proposal requires more than 50 hours of combined MS + PhD statistician time
• Many PIs see grant proposals as needing only last-minute statistical consulting and may get a different consultant every time
• Biostatisticians do not have time to do their best work, especially with regard to study design
• Difficult to keep good biostatisticians (especially in a market with huge shortage of graduates)
• Charging by the hour for proposals will allow the department to fund efforts but will stifle the collaborative spirit
• Charging by the hour makes it very difficult to hire biostatisticians in advance of need since the amount of this funding is difficult to predict at the time when hiring budgets are finalized
• There are ways other than grant proposals that biostatisticians can help foster research in clinical departments

The Plan

• Replace consultation (other than for very small projects) with collaboration
• Support other departments through new long-term collaboration model and rarely through hourly-charged consultation
• Department of Biostatistics development fund will provide 1:4 cost matching to other Divisions and Departments
• Example: Suppose that a Division with 7 active researchers not supported by a biostatistics core facility such as the Cancer Biostatistics Division or the GCRC needs one full-time PhD and one full-time MS biostatistician. That Division would pay
  • 4/5 of the MS biostatistician salary + fringe
  • 4/5 of the PhD biostatistician's non-protected time salary + fringe (64% of tenure-track faculty salary, 4/5 of non-tenure-track faculty (Note: Tenure-track faculty in the Department of Biostatistics receive 20% protected time for methodologic research)
  • 1/2 of professional expenses for these personnel
• This would provide
  • priority work on grant proposals from this group
  • data analysis for existing non-grant-funded projects
  • study and experimental design for non-grant-funded projects
  • assistance with non-grant-funded manuscripts
  • assistance with journal clubs (methodologic review)
  • assistance with research conference (e.g., data analysis and pre-conference critique of fellows' presentations)
  • teaching short courses in experimental design and analysis methodology for the Division
  • K award mentoring
• Understandings:
  • As grant proposals arising from this arrangement are funded, grant funds will supplement rather than replace the collaborative funding arrangement
  • As grants are funded, either new personnel will be hired or identified by the Department of Biostatistics to work on the new projects, or personnel supported by the collaboration arrangement will move to the new projects and new personnel will assume positions funded by the cost-sharing arrangement
  • For groups not requiring full-time collaborators, existing personnel may assume both roles
  • Division or Department head will prioritize usage of the resource by her or his faculty
  • Division or Department investigators will provide yearly input to Department of Biostatistics for faculty and staff reviews, regarding quality of collaborations and research by biostatisticians
• Option for Divisions/Departments Not in Collaboration Plan
  • Consulting charged by the hour
  • Available on an ''available personnel'', first-come, first-serve basis if sufficient lead time given
  • Difficult to allocate percent efforts to consulting group
  • Becoming more difficult to charge for internal consulting not based on FTEs

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How to Take Part in the Program

Go to OthDeptNeeds to tell us about your future needs, which will guide our recruiting of faculty and staff biostatisticians. Click the Edit button, create an ID and password, and add a bullet point describing type and extent of collaboration needs. Click on TextFormattingRules to learn the simple text markup rules for our collaborative web site.

-- FrankHarrell - 07 Apr 2004, 28 Oct 2005