Cross-Institutional Collaboration Using InfoReady at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
Executive Summary: The implementation of InfoReady at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center illustrates the potential for centralized systems to enhance cross-institutional collaboration, streamline administrative processes, and increase engagement with funding opportunities. As TTUHSC continues to expand its use of InfoReady, the institution anticipates further improvements in research collaboration and resource management.
Presenters:
Audrey DeLeon, Program Director of Research Collaboration, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
Jordan Nabers, Director of Corporate & Foundations Relations, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center has five different campuses. We are located in Abilene, Texas, Amarillo, Dallas, Fort Worth, Lubbock, and Midland, Odessa. Lubbock serves as the hub with each campus acting like a spoke. The entire system throughout these five campuses services a territory covering 108 counties, 65 of which are designated medically underserved and primarily rural.
Within the Health Sciences Center, we have six schools: Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, School of Health Professions, Population and Public Health, and the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. These six schools are distributed throughout our five campuses.
Texas Tech Health Sciences Center is the leading provider of health care graduates in the state of Texas.
As our Research Collaboration division grows, we're working to build connections across our campuses and schools, and then even programs and departments within those. We are really trying to focus on bridging the two Health Sciences Centers and the other TTU institutions. So last year, our leaders of HSC and TTU decided to pilot a joint research day in Amarillo on the campus. It was to be a research symposium, and all students and trainees were invited to participate. Our leaders figured that would be a great way to combine forces, as prior to our event each school handled their research day differently.
We decided this event would be a daylong event and have both poster and oral presentations. Our big need that we identified for InfoReady would be to collect a high volume of abstracts in a centralized location for faculty to complete their reviews within a week.
Then on the back-end, our admin committee had to compile the data that was collected from these submissions.
We decided InfoReady was also a great way that we could communicate with a large group of participants at once.
Implementation of InfoReady
In early 2023, the Office of Research and Innovation, and the Office of Institutional Advancement decided we needed a system to communicate funding opportunities with our faculty and staff. We looked at InfoReady as a central repository of private funding opportunities, including limited submission opportunities, which also provided a way to communicate them in a centralized manner across campus.
We realized InfoReady was also a great way that we could communicate with a large group of participants at once so we decided to use it for the symposium.
A Successful Cross-Institutional Research Symposium
InfoReady was used to collect and review 155 abstracts, with 117 selected for presentation.
Faculty reviewers were assigned abstracts from their respective schools, and the scoring process was facilitated through InfoReady.
Automated and manual communications were used to guide participants through the submission and presentation process.
Our event success was achieved with InfoReady because this is how we selected our participants. On the day of, we had 113 presenters, and we had over 300 attendees at the actual event. We definitely think this first year of a cross-institutional event was a success, not only opportunity in using InfoReady, but also as a research symposium.