NIH ES Electronic Research Administration (eRA)

eRA is the NIH grants management system that provides a cost benefit to HHS by providing the automated grants management capabilities utilized by NIH and several of the HHS OpDivs, including CDC, FDA, SAMHSA, and AHRQ, as well as to the VA. This reduces the cost of duplicative IT expenditures across the different organizations, as well as promotes a collaborative and consistent approach for processing grant applications. For the eRA user community, one of the major benefits is an integrated enterprise level system that consistently supports the main business areas that comprise the grant life cycle by gathering, validating, processing, routing, consolidating and securing grant related data to empower users to make data-driven decisions. This data and the related processes allow the grantee and grantor community to efficiently and effectively award and manage grants that benefit many aspects in the life of American people. Using the data, the eRA users can also have a better understanding of their own organizations as well as the organizations they serve, how well the business processes work and even derive performance metrics to track and measure the success of the different business functions. With the common services provided by the eRA system, HHS is avoiding the costs that each of the NIH IC's and HHS OPDIVs would have to invest in the development of their own systems and the infrastructure to run and maintain it. A conservative estimate for developing and running a medium size system for an IC (10 FTE Contractors, 2 Feds and the required IT infrastructure) is $3.5M a year. The total estimated costs of all the systems combined would be estimated at $100M a year. The total cost avoidance resulting from eRA is estimated at $55M a year.

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