HRA Analyzer

Many Practically Speaking readers are familiar with the National Institutes of Health NIH RePORTER, a searchable database that provides comprehensive information on research funded by the NIH and other federal agencies.

You can use this database to learn about research that is funded by topic, institution, or principal investigator, to give a few examples. However, this system doesn’t capture the investment in biomedical research from the nonprofit community, which is estimated to be $5 billion each year.

The Health Research Alliance’s HRA Analyzer has been developed to fill the gap. It is the real time, searchable database of awards made by HRA member organizations. The goal of HRA Analyzer is to represent the full scope of awards by nonprofit organizations and to provide a clearer picture of the biomedical research funding landscape. HRA Analyzer enables data-driven analysis and strategic grantmaking by HRA members, and it also fosters collaboration between organizations with aligned programs and missions. Currently, the HRA Analyzer contains well over $18 billion in funding and more than 60,000 separate grants from 2006 to the present.

HRA partnered with Digital Science to create the database. It is a customized version of Digital Science’s flagship offering, Dimensions, a global award database covering hundreds of funders and with over $1 trillion in historical and future funded research. HRA Analyzer functionality includes automated coding of research areas using multiple different taxonomies, the ability to drill down to individual grant data including associated publications, and the power to visualize data and trends in a variety of ways. HRA Analyzer not only includes HRA members’ awardee data but also includes NIH funding and publication data as well.

In the future, HRA hopes to create a public-facing portal so that others can search for information about research awards made by HRA members.

The Health Research Alliance is a membership organization of nongovernmental funders of health research, including voluntary health agencies, private foundations, and operating foundations. All of these organizations share a common interest in speeding the translation of biomedical science discoveries into applications that improve health, and in identifying and adopting best practices in funding health research. HRA currently has 90 members including Donaghue.