The new NIH grant summary statement will look like this

In case you managed to miss it, this round of NIH reviews will use a changed scoring system which we’ve previously discussed. It will also be associated with an unfamiliar summary statement. For those of us that review we will have to put away our venerable Stock Critique Templates. Fortunately, the Center for Scientific Review has provided a replacement along with a host of other informational documents on the new review system.

The handy-dandy new Stock Critique Template provided by CSR looks like this:
Overall Impact (Please limit text to ¼ page )
Strengths

• High potential impact in clinically important area of safe blood transfusion.
• Highly qualified investigators with complementary expertise ensure likely success.
• Novel application of incident reporting methods now in use in other fields could lead to improved public confidence in blood supply.
• The study will bring a rigourous, systematic approach to the current error reporting process, which is empiric and lacking in evaluation.

Weaknesses

• Lack of representation of non-academic transfusion medicine practitioners may make incident reporting less effective in non-academic hospital setting.
• • Not enough time is allotted for aim one work and aims two and three too dependent on success of aim one work lessens confidence that work can be successfully completed.

SCORED REVIEW CRITERIA
1. Significance (Please limit text to ¼ page)
Strengths

• An effective incident reporting system should greatly increase confidence of the public in safety of the blood supply.
• Models developed for other error-critical fields have been effectively adapted in the development of an incident-reporting system for transfusion medicine.
• Identifies and incorporates limited and appropriate range of human error patterns–will be easily transferable to practice.
• Could be generally applicable to understanding influence of incentives/disincentives on behavior.

Weaknesses

• Premise that human error follows limited range of patterns in diverse situations may not hold true.
• Unclear how incident reporting system would be utilized to reduce human error.
• Unclear whether public perception or clinical need is target of model application.

2. Investigator(s) (Please limit text to ¼ page)
Strengths

• Investigators are well recognized for their expertise in blood banking.
• The PI has a strong publication record in field of HIV analysis in the context of blood transfusions.
• Collaborators have expertise in error-critical fields and are complementary in expertise to PI.

Weaknesses

• Levels of effort propsed by investigators are unlikely to be sufficient for scope of project, raising doubts that goals will be accomplished.
• There is not sufficient expertise in the area of transfusion medicine. Research plan would benefit from input from someone with expertise in collection & transfusion in non-academic hospital setting.

3. Innovation (Please limit text to ¼ page)
Strengths

• Adaptation of incident reporting systems used in other error-critical fields (aviation, nuclear power, anesthesiology) to transfusion medicine is highly innovative.
• Use of positive reinforcement to address disincentives associated with self reporting of errors.

Weaknesses
4. Approach (Please limit text to ¼ page)
Strengths

• The experiments are well designed with appropriate controls proposed.
• Potential problems are anticipated and alternative approaches are presented.
• Conceptual framework for the entire project is well developed and supported.
• Use of ubiquitous computer platform to manage information is sound and generates confidence in the potential expandability of the system across the country.

Weaknesses

• Time alloted for aim one work is likely to be insufficient.
• Aims two and three are less well developed because they are dependent on outcome of aim one.
• It is unclear which test site will provide gold standard against which results from other sites are compared.
• Test sites are all academic institutions and thus lack real world diversity; hospitals/community health centers should be included so that results are more generalizable.

5. Environment (Please limit text to ¼ page)
Strengths

• Outstanding scientific environment in each participating institution.
• Strong commitment of support from each institution.
• Opinion leaders in transfusion medicine field will participate.

Weaknesses

• Notable omission is the absence of non-academic hospital settings.
• Better plan to ensure uniformity across sites is needed.