Lessons in Redundancy From an NIH Grant Application
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You’re all going to be jealous. I spent a bunch of hours, part of my Sunday morning and early afternoon, creating my latest NIH Biographical Sketch Common Form and NIH Biographical Sketch Supplement.
I told you you’d be jealous.
Colleagues I’ve been working with on some projects are submitting a large NIH multi-year multi-institution grant and asked me and a couple of my partners to join in.
Of course, we all needed to submit our CVs and NIH bio sketches, but when I looked back, mine had last been updated in 2023.
Apparently, in the interim, NIH moved from their old form to a new web-based platform where essentially everything must be manually entered and certified by the user.
So I went to the website, signed up, created a new password, and started generating the bio sketch form.
They requested a lot of the usual stuff: name, email, current position and institution, a lot of bibliographic information, honors and awards, contributions to science, some personal statements.
Favorite color, mother’s maiden name, make and model of your first car.
Nothing too extraordinary or complicated.
Luckily, I have recently updated my “Statement of Key Contributions” for our institution as part of my promotion packet, so a lot of this content was available on my computer for cutting and pasting.
Once I’d moved through all the sections, the last one was a place where you are supposed to certify that everything you entered is true, along with a couple other indemnifying statements.
I clicked the button and followed the directions but found nowhere to sign.
I went first to their help page, and then to the Internet, to try and figure out what I was doing wrong. I went down a number of blind pathways, tried a bunch of solutions suggested by various users, but I just could not seem to figure it out.
Finally, I found someone who’d written that they’d experienced something similar, and that the only solution was to go through the website field by field, entry by entry, double checking that everything required was filled out, and that no extra spaces were included in lines at the end of each entry.
I went back to the beginning, toggling through each field, until finally, I found an extra hard return in one of the sections, deleted it, and was finally able to certify the document.
Now I’m exhausted.
Much of the information I entered was cut and pasted, much of it was readily retrievable through PubMed and other publicly available resources. Then there were a few items that required some creative writing about what my clinical and research interests have been and what my contributions to science have demonstrated over my career.
This certified PDF is going to be attached, along with those of about a dozen other investigators involved in this project, to the back of a massive application for this large NIH grant. But I’m pretty sure no one’s ever going to read it.
And why would they?
So much information, copied over so many times, downloaded and printed and scanned and uploaded and affixed to a file, all for what purpose?
We spend our days clicking back and forth within an electronic medical record, logging into 18 different applications, doing busy work that doesn’t really require much mental energy, but leaves us psychically burned out and exhausted.
It feels like artificial intelligence (AI) could have done this for me. I should’ve been able to just fill in the blanks, and all this stuff could have been put into the right places to get this form completed in just a few seconds.
The same holds true in so much of our day-to-day clinical work, as we trudge through the stuff we need to do to complete everything we need to take care of our patients.
Why in the world are home care agencies still faxing us a form we need to print out, hand sign and date, and fax back to them?
Why, when our patients need supplies to manage their wounds, keep their ostomy sites intact, safely move through their home environment, do we need to print out a hard copy of a durable medical equipment prescription and fax it over to somebody to include in a file somewhere that no one is ever going to look at, when electronic prescribing exists and is probably safer and more accurate?
So much redundancy, so much wasted energy, so many rules that someone thought were important to protect someone from something.
Maybe if the AI systems don’t end up killing us all, they could end up helping us by eliminating all of this, by prompting the system: you know the answer to this one, you know what year Dr. Pelzman graduated from medical school, what his publications are, who he really is.
At the end of certifying this NIH form, it turned out I needed another ID to certify with, beyond the ID I had to create to log on to their system.
So, I went to yet another website, entered my name, email, current employment, and got my free new ID.
I dutifully went back to the NIH website, entered it where requested, and lo and behold, everyone was happy.
I understand the need to be careful, to make sure we’re all who we say we are, that no one is committing fraud and abuse in our names.
But you’d think that with dual factor authorization, secure websites with good security, safe passwords, electronic passkeys, we’d get beyond all this. We should focus on simplifying, streamlining, smoothing things out, freeing up space in our brains to let us get back to providing care.
But that’s just me, and maybe I’m not who I say I am.
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