1b. GAITS Overview

GAITS stands for the Guidance and Impact Tracking System: a secure, web-enabled project and portfolio management platform designed to assist the commercialization of healthcare innovations. It is focused on helping teams with innovative healthcare ideas and the portfolio managers that support learn from the experiences of others to more efficiently speed innovative solutions to patient care.  

For Teams: It provides milestones, deliverables and resources to guide teams through the challenging journey of innovation in healthcare - improving the chances that promising innovations actually reach patients . It helps teams plan its work to avoid preventable mistakes that can derail even the most promising of ideas. It also helps them promote their innovation to potential collaborators and show funders the impact they have created. 

For Portfolio Managers: It gives portfolio managers, such as tech transfer offices and funders, a valuable tool to help evaluate, select, manage, and monitor a portfolio of diverse projects. It streamlines the reporting process and provides a quick overview of a teams progress. It has the potential to make a significant impact by improving translational research: it creates a robust database to study and benchmark approaches used by different groups to establish and share best practices. 

The Healthcare Innovation Cycle is the foundation for GAITS. It is an established best practice itself, based on CIMIT's 20+ years of experience supporting more than 600 projects and 230 solutions in their unique journeys. Its foundational premise is that innovation in healthcare is a learnable, teachable process.  And, like any process, it can be de-risked by executing tasks in the right sequence. Paralleling the DoD’s well-established Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs), the Healthcare Innovation Cycle establishes a sequence of 10 healthcare specific milestones. Each milestone is defined by a core set of deliverables which ensure a balanced perspective from the four domains critical to success in healthcare innovation: Clinical, Market/Business, Regulatory/ Approvals, as well as Technology.

The GAITS platform builds on that foundation to support teams and portfolio managers so that they can learn and use best practices with four interrelated capabilities:
 

Development of GAITS was supported by the National Institute Of Biomedical Imaging And Bioengineering (NIBIB) and the National Heart, Lung, And Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number U54EB015408. 

The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.