Client: The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is Canada’s leading federal agency dedicated to health research. CIHR’s mission is to promote scientific awareness, facilitate knowledge translation, and advance effective healthcare products and services within Canada’s healthcare system.
Challenge: CIHR holds multiple research funding competitions annually. Managing these competitions—assigning research papers to appropriate reviewers and conducting reassessments—was a manual process prone to inefficiencies and potential errors. CIHR required a solution to automate and optimize the process, ensuring accurate and fair assignment of reviewers. Specifically, they needed an advanced analytics tool to automate grant application reviewer assignments based on multiple constraints and variables SSI performed a detailed analysis of the challenge and proposed a dual-phase mathematical model as a solution for the funding competition delivery process.
Solution: SSI developed a custom application to optimize CIHR’s grant application reviewer assignment process. The solution was designed in two phases:
- Phase 1: Applications were assigned to reviewers based on their expertise, competency, and ability to identify potential conflicts of interest.
- Phase 2: After initial reviews were completed, the applications were reassigned to a secondary set of reviewers for peer assessment, ensuring thorough and unbiased feedback.
The following key rules were integrated into the model to address specific constraints:
- English applications were assigned to English-speaking reviewers, and French applications to French-speaking reviewers.
- Reviewers with conflicts of interest, such as those submitting their own applications, were excluded.
- Applications were only assigned if reviewers met a minimum suitability threshold.
- The number of reviewers per application adhered to specified minimum and maximum limits.
- The number of applications per reviewer was controlled to ensure balanced workloads.
By implementing these rules, SSI successfully automated the entire process, resolving the identified constraints and improving the overall efficiency of the assignment process.
Result: The new application, powered by a scoring model that accounted for various limitations and variables, transformed CIHR’s research funding process. It enhanced the accuracy, transparency, and fairness of reviewer assignments. The automation significantly reduced the number of man-hours required for each competition, enabling CIHR to streamline its operations and focus on advancing health research.