Midterm Review "Parelsnoer Initiatief" (PSI)

Upon the initiative of the PSI directorate and in the commission of the NFU board, InnoTact Consulting had carried out a midterm review between August and November 2010.

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The "Parelsnoer Initiatief" (PSI)

PSI gathers clinical data as well as images and biomaterials about eight specific syndromes from patient groups at inter-university level. PSI was established in 2007 by the Dutch Federation of University Medical Centres (Dutch: NFU) with a government subsidy originating from the Fund for Economic Structure Reinforcement (Dutch: FES). The project runs through 2011.

More information can be found on the website of the Parelsnoer Initiatief.

The question

The NFU Board had asked InnoTact Consulting to provide an evaluation of the goal-orientation and efficiency that PSI had achieved since the start of the project. In short, to provide PSI with the answers to two questions: Is PSI doing the right things? Does PSI do these things correctly?

What InnoTact did

In order to study this case, InnoTact Consulting spoke to more than 30 involved persons: the members of the directorate, managers, employees of the PSI project office, deans, project managers, assistant project managers, bio-bank administrators and ICT people in the University Medical Centres (UMC). The approximately seventy scientists that are active in PSI were consulted based on an online questionnaire.

Furthermore, InnoTact studied various documents and reports by and about PSI. We interpreted the information collected and placed it within the perspective of the environment in which PSI operates and the work area that it covers, in order to subsequently arrive at 20 conclusions with regard to goal-orientation that PSI has built up in its first years and with regard to efficiency during implementation.

During the implementation track we were guided by a committee consisting of internal and external experts. The guidance committee monitored the work procedures of InnoTact Consulting and provided us with both requested and voluntary advice.

The result

In the final report we presented a 30 concise and clear conclusions related to the objectives of the project and to the various aspects of efficiency. In addition, we provided 12 recommendations for securing the achievements of the project and for formulating new ambitions for the partnership.

The final report was submitted to the NFU Board at the end of December 2010. This plays an important role for the eight deans when it comes to decision-making regarding the contributions of the UMCs to the Parelsnoer (Strings of Pearls) bio-banks after the completion of the project period.

Cases

Related Case(s)