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Feb. 11th, 2010 12:08 amGreetings from a hotel room paid for with your tax dollars!
Feb. 11th, 2010
Old skule workies
Feb. 11th, 2010 03:36 pmSo I just did my first peer review support in... uh... 6 years? Seven? A company I never heard of contacted my friend Didi Tartville, who passed the info on to me; and based on my resume I ended up hired to support a grants peer review panel today.
So last night I stayed at the Beacon Hotel, about 1.8 miles SSW of my house. Because the transit situation for this morning was unknown and my meeting was supposed to start at 8:30, they wanted me on site overnight. Our panel finished discussing 10 applications by 11:30 and I was home by 1. They fed me breakfast and lunch... real food, too, none o'that continental crap: bacon, eggs, and potatoes for brekkie; salmon steak Hollandaise, steamed broccoli, and a sort of mumble-mumble-Asian medley of barley, chard, edamame, etc. with a ginger-soy-something-else-going-on dressing. Yum!
It's an interesting program I'm supporting, too: through last year's American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, HHS now has something called the Office of the National Coordinator for health-care related IT. They're establishing regional centers to provide training and technical assistance to 'priority primary health care providers' (focusing on providers whose clientele are in large part members of underserved populations) on IT-related stuff, like portable electronic health care records. Also importantly, the grant program provides 90 percent of the successful regional centers' funding for two years, by which time the awardees are expected to have replaced that income; for the next two years only 10 percent of operating costs will be federally funded.
The logistics contractor that set all this up for HHS-ONC is absolutely clueless. My queries about the review process went completely unanswered for 10 days until program staff kindly related to me this morning what the fuck I was supposed to do, a few minutes before I started doing it. I begged for an estimate of how many hours the job would be, but answer came there none. As I sat down to the panel room laptop I had NO resources: not a list of the applicants, not the reviewers' written comments, not even the reviewers' names. For lack of anything better to do, I opened a blank Word document and started typing.
I was reminded of exactly how clueless my old employer PSA (Pleni Sunt Ani) was, a decade ago... and how clueless they steadfastly remained until they lost all their solid peer review support contracts. Ugh. That this sort of dumbass company can continually fool new people into believing they have the first clue what they're doing is just... unacceptable.
Anyway. I bonded with the program staff, mentioning that I sat on the advisory committee that developed and drafted the standard operating procedures for HRSA's Division of Independent Review, and passed to the fedboss the names of the two primary companies currently supporting the DIR, which by all accounts (including, importantly, Ms. Tartville's) know exactly what they're doing on peer review support. She seemed grateful for the information, and to know me. Rah, I networked!
So last night I stayed at the Beacon Hotel, about 1.8 miles SSW of my house. Because the transit situation for this morning was unknown and my meeting was supposed to start at 8:30, they wanted me on site overnight. Our panel finished discussing 10 applications by 11:30 and I was home by 1. They fed me breakfast and lunch... real food, too, none o'that continental crap: bacon, eggs, and potatoes for brekkie; salmon steak Hollandaise, steamed broccoli, and a sort of mumble-mumble-Asian medley of barley, chard, edamame, etc. with a ginger-soy-something-else-going-on dressing. Yum!
It's an interesting program I'm supporting, too: through last year's American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, HHS now has something called the Office of the National Coordinator for health-care related IT. They're establishing regional centers to provide training and technical assistance to 'priority primary health care providers' (focusing on providers whose clientele are in large part members of underserved populations) on IT-related stuff, like portable electronic health care records. Also importantly, the grant program provides 90 percent of the successful regional centers' funding for two years, by which time the awardees are expected to have replaced that income; for the next two years only 10 percent of operating costs will be federally funded.
The logistics contractor that set all this up for HHS-ONC is absolutely clueless. My queries about the review process went completely unanswered for 10 days until program staff kindly related to me this morning what the fuck I was supposed to do, a few minutes before I started doing it. I begged for an estimate of how many hours the job would be, but answer came there none. As I sat down to the panel room laptop I had NO resources: not a list of the applicants, not the reviewers' written comments, not even the reviewers' names. For lack of anything better to do, I opened a blank Word document and started typing.
I was reminded of exactly how clueless my old employer PSA (Pleni Sunt Ani) was, a decade ago... and how clueless they steadfastly remained until they lost all their solid peer review support contracts. Ugh. That this sort of dumbass company can continually fool new people into believing they have the first clue what they're doing is just... unacceptable.
Anyway. I bonded with the program staff, mentioning that I sat on the advisory committee that developed and drafted the standard operating procedures for HRSA's Division of Independent Review, and passed to the fedboss the names of the two primary companies currently supporting the DIR, which by all accounts (including, importantly, Ms. Tartville's) know exactly what they're doing on peer review support. She seemed grateful for the information, and to know me. Rah, I networked!