By consolidating 14 scientific cores under one organizational umbrella, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) has increased the visibility of cores across its campus, improved operational efficiency, and established a system of internal and external review, all while coming in under budget.
Cores grew organically from need within a department, and the University Shared Resources program grew from a common desire to better co-ordinate the cores’ assets. A principal investigator needed a piece of equipment—a mass spectrometer or a next-gen sequencer, for example—that was too expensive for the department to justify for a single researcher. Department heads started making these purchases for the entire department to share, and a “core” facility was born. Over the years, 14 cores serving 1,200 PIs sprouted independently across OHSU, with no central management or even a clear campus-wide inventory.
“It’s really amazing how siloed we can get in the academic communities,” says Andrew Chitty, director of University Shared Resources (USR).
While it’s cheaper to share equipment within a research organization, most cores still require financial support beyond the user fees, partly because NIH rules prohibit them from making a profit on NIH-funded equipment. As the cost of buying, operating, and maintaining increasingly complex scientific equipment outgrew the budget of a single department, it became clear that the model wasn’t sustainable. Core directors, who met monthly, hatched the idea of a centralized organization that would manage and help fund these resources on a university-wide basis.
“I started, as the program manager, looking at this as a core portfolio that we need to invest in, and that needs to address the needs of everybody on campus,” says Chitty. “I wanted to leverage the existing strength of the cores, reduce redundancies on campus, and increase the efficiencies and effectiveness of what the cores were already doing well.”
Chitty was tasked with supporting the mission of the cores to remain on the cutting edge scientifically while also being financially sustainable, which takes much of the onus off the core directors. To accomplish that, he pursued several tactical goals.
The first two objectives were to increase the visibility of cores on campus and align the cores’ objectives with investigators’ needs. You can’t access a core if you don’t even know it’s there, so Chitty’s first task was to create a web-based catalogue of existing cores.
“I wanted to have them all listed in one place, so that we look like a functional unit on campus, not a bunch of disparate groups in different labs,” he says.
He asked each departmental core director to explain, in 20 words or fewer, exactly what they had to offer. These short, digestible blurbs can be distributed in multiple ways: They can be listed on the OHSU website, printed on counter cards, even embedded in a smartphone app where an icon takes you to the core description linking to the core’s website.
“If you walk around campus and say, ‘Did you know we have a data handling facility?’ it is amazing how many people will say, “‘No, I have been doing that myself,’” says Chitty. And because the cores grew organically out of departmental need, their goals were often not aligned with the rest of the university’s.
Once that information was made available, Chitty needed to work on improving communication between PIs, core directors, and administrators, who were not accustomed to venturing outside their siloes. “I spend a lot of my time running around and helping people talk to each other, helping them align their thought processes and goals.”
Financial Constraints
The final objective addresses the financial sustainability of USR by looking at charge-backs for external users. Internal university clients can be charged only cost-based rates, according to the NIH restrictions. But OHSU can charge the market rate if a commercial institution uses a USR core. In fact, it sometimes is required to because of anti-compete laws.
“If Pfizer or another university comes to us, and that money is not directly coming from the NIH, we can charge as much as we’d like,” explains Chitty.
Sometimes a small amount of money can make all the difference to the operation of a scientific core. If a core ends the year with a $20,000 deficit, it is carried over to the following year with little chance of recovery, and the deficit is likely to compound.
“I have a certain amount of money I can use to bring them back to zero every year,” says Chitty. “That is a big deal for these guys.”
An unforeseen result of the USR’s cooperative management has been a shared sense of purpose among the core directors. In the past, they may have lobbied for a major piece of equipment that would benefit just their department. Now they think of themselves as part of a university-wide scientific community that weighs these purchases in the context of a larger organization.
“You find core directors who think it’s strategically better for one core to have an instrument or piece of equipment, so they’ll take their request off the table,” says Chitty. “It really increases camaraderie and collaboration between them. It’s been fantastic.”
USR also has more leverage than a single core. For example, one director bought a mass spec just a few weeks before the next generation Orbitrap mass spec was unveiled. His new purchase was immediately obsolete.
“I had the time to go back to Thermo and say ‘This is not right. We want to cancel that order and we want the Orbitrap, because that is the latest and greatest,’” says Chitty. “But it cost $100,000 more, so I ran around trying to raise $100,000 extra for that million-dollar purchase. Everybody understood that, and everybody pitched in from the entire university community, and we were able to get that Orbitrap.”
Internal and External Evaluation
Chitty put in place a system of annual evaluations to make sure that the core directors reflect on the scientific and financial performance of their core and set goals for the coming year. They also produce a mid-year financial report so that Chitty knows how much money they will likely need to balance their books at the end of the year. “I try to make this process as easy and as quick as possible,” he says.
Each core has its own advisory council made up of users and other interested parties who meet at least quarterly.
Chitty augments this self-examination with external evaluators who are experts in each specific core, some of his choosing and some chosen by the core directors. He stresses that the process is not punitive; it is not his goal to find fault with core directors or their operation, but to make the whole system function better. The external evaluations cost about $5,000 apiece, but Chitty says it can pay for itself over time.
“The impact is significant, because you get unbiased information from the outside, from experts who are picked by the manager and the core director to come in and help them,” he says. “Often, that translates into information that is given to the administration to help them get funding to improve their operations.”
Chitty says he evaluates the core portfolio the way someone may analyze a mutual fund: He and an advisory committee weigh the core’s scientific benefit against the financial sustainability. Sometimes, in extreme cases, that necessitates one core being merged with another or eliminated altogether.
“These people, and a core director, need help to bounce ideas off people about what they are trying to do,” explains Chitty. “They sometimes need someone to come in and say, ‘No, you are not going to go in that direction; it is not going to work.’”
“The result has been more strategic funding throughout, and better collaboration among the cores for capital goods analysis,” says Chitty. “In some cases, we integrate facilities to strengthen our portfolio. For example, our integrated genomics lab has next-gen sequencing, gene microarrays, flow cytometry, and Sanger sequencing, which used to operate as four cores.”
By functioning as a collaborative entity, they can shepherd projects through more efficiently, cross-train the people who work in the cores, and develop focused collaborations.
Looking to the Future
The USR model has generated tangible results for OHSU. USR came in 15 percent under its $1 million FY 2014 budget, and added five new cores. As a result, OHSU doubled Chitty’s budget. And USR has developed a strong affiliation with the Knight Cancer Center, whose benefactor, Nike founder Phil Knight, has committed to donating $500 million in matching funds to OHSU. USR is involved in helping to develop and design new facilities with core operations in mind.
Chitty is looking beyond OHSU to expand the opportunities for his researchers and for the cores, by forging partnerships with other universities to determine whose institution should host which cores. “Maybe OHSU doesn’t need to develop cores for every need if we can strategically partner with others who are better positioned to offer optimal services,” he says.
He is also working with Florida State University to develop a software program called Scientific Resource Asset Management (SciRAM) that will allow institutions to enter information about their cores in an open database, like Wikipedia, for researchers to shop around for the equipment or instruments they need.
