The GAITS platform implements CIMIT's Healthcare Innovation Cycle, a best practice to navigate the challenging journey of innovating in healthcare. Each GAITS site can help a team structure its work in a way that speeds and de-rsiks a project to increas the likelihood of improving patient care. It also documents your work in a structured way, helping to onboard new team members and support a potential future funder in conducting due diligence.

At its core, GAITS lays out a sequence of "deliverables" which describe outputs that the teams should generate. Deliverbles are organized by maturity levels (modeled on Technology Readiness Levels - TRLs) and 4 domains critical in healthcare: Clinical, Regulatory, Market/Business, and Technology. View the video below to learn about the Healthcare Innovation Cycle and how it is implemented in GAITS. For more information on the GAITS pltaform see: LINK

Each GAITS site is private to a team. The GAITS platform has been validated to meet strict security standards, such as those of the NIH’s, and can house confidential data - but no patient data is to be included. To learn more about GAITS terms and security see: LINK

GAITS sites are housed within a portfolio of projects managed within in a cohort. Only the program faculty will have access to the full portfolio and are bound by confidentiality. Project team members have access to the site as long as it remains active. If there is no activity for 6 months, the site will be deactivated. After 6 months of inactivity, individual team member's accounts will also be deactived. Upon request, a team member's access and the site can be reactivated. In the future a deactivated site may be deleted after an additional period of inactivity. At any time teams can ask to have a site deleted and a team member can ask to have their account deleted.

To start using a GAITS site, the team lead/PI should give team members access to the site. All team members should take a few minutes to understand the structure of GAITS and in particular a "Deliverable". The recommended steps are:

1. Managing Access and Inviting Team Members:

To start using the GAITS platform, the first step is for the team lead/PI (who is added to the site as an Admin) to invite team members to join. Use the Members tab and add the email address of the team member along with the role they should have. The Admin can invite other team members in as Admins or as a Team Member (with read/write access) or as a Viewer (with read only access). An Admin can also remove a member's access at any time

2. Accessing and Understanding Deliverables:

GAITS uses Deliverables to describe the work that needs to be done to complete the cell representing the overlap of a Maturity Level and Domain. See the video below to learn about the structure of a GAITS Deliverable.

A recommended early task is to complete an initial self-assessment of a project's status. This is done by estimating the % complete of all active and completed deliverables. This is critical to help a mentor/advisor understand the progress you have made and see any gaps that may exist to help establish priorities in moving forward.

Think of this as a diagnostic. The more accurate the assessment, the better you are able to plan your work and the more accurate a mentor/advisor will be in giving you feedback and advice. However, unlike most diagnostics, there are no “good” or “bad” results. Some teams are at earlier stages than others and that is fine. As such, there is no benefit to claiming to be further along than you actually are – in fact it could make it much more difficult to plan your work - and create risks by building on a flawed foundation.

The process of conducting a maturity self-assessment is fairly straight forward and can usually be done in under a couple of hours. It is strongly recommended that you complete this task as a team to ensure as much consensus as possible. The self-assessment is done by estimating the % complete of all the active and completed Deliverables in the GAITS carousel. As you assign a % complete range, you will see the radial height of each segment in the Tracking carousel increase. If possible, a self-assessment should to be reviewed with a mentor/advisor.

There are multiple ways to update the status of a deliverable as described in the video below:

As you update the status of a deliverable, a record is kept which creates a longitudinal record which can be played back to see how a project matured over time. When doing the initial self-assessment when using GAITS, the dates assigned to the status value is the date it was added, not the date the status was actually changed. This video shows how to edit the historical record of deliverables to create a true picture of how your project progressed.

In some instances, there may not be a good match between the core set of Deliverables in GAITS and work you feel needs to be tracked. For example, there may be a task that is very specific to your solution. As explained in the video below, Admins can add custom Deliverables by clicking on the appropriate maturity level and then clicking on the "Add Requirement" link in the appropriate Domian. These custom Deliverables will be treated the same as all Deliverables and can be added to a Work Package as described before.

The reality is that projects are not managed by deliverables - they are managed through a series of efforts. Most often these efforts represent distinct funding tranches in which a scope of work is agreed. That scope of work can be described as a bundle of deliverables, which is what we call a "Work Package" (WP)

Work Packages are characterized by a start date, duration, and optionally a budget and other descriptive fields. They can include work in multiple domains as well as be conducted in parallel or sequentially with other Work Packages.

Capturing metrics on a project's progress in real time can create a powerful tool to show current and future funders the traction you have created. Too often, we see team collect this information in a haphazard and unstructured way. In addition, it is often done after the fact, so the data is incomplete and the quality poor. See how to select and capture metrics in GAITS. Note, custom metrics can be created - please contact John Collins with any requests. (john.collins@gaits.org)