(Circulation. 1995;92:2024-2025.)
© 1995 American Heart Association, Inc.
Articles |
NHLBI Cost-Management Strategies
A Success Story
From the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Bethesda, Md.
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Introduction |
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Some time ago (see July 1994 issue of Circulation), we described some innovative cost-management strategies used by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) in funding research project grants and provided preliminary data on their effectiveness. Now, with 5 years of experience in implementing these strategies, we would like to revisit the issue and focus more detailed attention on the extent to which our approaches have benefited the research enterprise.
As the readership may recall, impetus for development of new financial management approaches was provided by the House Appropriations Committee report for fiscal year 1991, which urged the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to "aggressively eliminate any costs which they believe are unnecessary ... [after which] a grant should be funded at the full level without arbitrary reductions." This directive presented a difficult challenge to the NHLBI and other NIH components because rapid escalations in the cost of conducting biomedical research had made it impossible to fully fund the mandated number of grants within the allocation. The widespread practice of imposing across-the-board "downward negotiations" constituted an unenlightened and unwelcome solution to the problem.
After considerable analysis and discussion with the institute's advisors, a new cost-management approach was put into place based on the following decisions:
to restrict the growth of competing renewal grants by limiting their increase over the last noncompeting year to 10%;
to award new grants at council-recommended levels, less appropriate adjustments for overlap with other support and programmatic considerations;
to make cost a factor in