This globally-renowned cancer research, teaching, and treatment hospital has thousands of faculty members with extensive credentials, qualifications, and appointments. Faculty member achievements and experience help promote the hospital and its collective knowledge. They are also useful resources for monitoring research activities and producing reliable reports to satisfy grant funding requirements. Without research grant dollars, this hospital wouldn’t be able to provide the academic development opportunities that keep it ranked at the top of research and teaching hospitals.
Each faculty member is personally responsible for keeping a current detailed curriculum vitae (CV) of their appointments, affiliations, education, training, certifications, and publications. To make it easy, the hospital initially set up a shared drive where each faculty member maintained their CV in a Microsoft Word document. Without any standards, however, the details in the CVs were inconsistent, based on differing industry standards, individual availability, and purpose. This resulted in required information being scattered across thousands of individual documents, sometimes filling over a hundred pages for one person. Consequently, finding the right information was both time-consuming and costly, and not finding the right information could jeopardize valuable research dollars.
In order to effectively perform topic-based searches and produce reliable results, this client recognized faculty information needed to be housed in one system with a set of widespread standards instead of individually maintained documents. They also understood that the new system had to provide an easy user interface for faculty members to update information on a regular basis.
Unorganized faculty information across inconsistent sources
Migrate content to a single location with standard attributes
Information is readily available for reporting, displayed consistently for research and comparison, and updated in a single location
Next, they needed to migrate the existing CVs into the new system. Effective migration requires content cleaning and preparation before it can be imported into a new system. Asking each faculty member to prep their own CV for migration was a non-starter, as it would have been an inefficient use of their time and resources. Therefore, this client asked Access Sciences to prepare the CVs for migration using information management best practices.
To achieve this objective, we dissected each faculty member’s CV and mapped the contents to specific fields in the database. We also normalized the content of publications using PubMed.gov, a governmental source for publication citations, guaranteeing consistent matching across the entire database.
With the new system:
