The GIM Methods Core Service Center provides a well managed, high quality, effective, and efficient environment to support GIM faculty, GIM trainees, and Diabetes Prevention and Control (P&C) Core investigators. The Service Center's background, services, general policies, and rate schedule are described below. 

Background

The GIM Methods Core was established to provide integrated research consultation and services to the Division faculty and fellows and to Osler Housestaff. Hopkins GIM is also the home of an NIDDK-funded Diabetes Prevention and Control Core, a part of a larger Johns Hopkins-University of Maryland Diabetes Research and Training Center (DRTC). Both entities share a common mission: to provide methodological and technical consultation and support. Both entities also share common faculty (PhDs with primary appointments in the GIM Division) and graduate research assistant staff (from the Bloomberg School of Public Health). The Service Center serves both the GIM Methods Core and the Diabetes P&C Core.

Services

Service Center faculty are available to consult P&C investigators, GIM faculty, Fellows, and medical residents on:

• study design
• biostatistics
• epidemiology
• behavioral medicine
• health outcomes and services research
• health informatics

The Service Center supports the design and implementation of:

• data collection instruments
• data entry procedures
• database management.

The Center also oversees a team of graduate research assistants to perform basic and complex statistical analysis for research projects. For high-level complicated analysis methods or statistical programming, the Service Center will seek guidance from the Biostatistics Consultation Center and carry through on the conduct of the analyses.

Rate Schedule

A rate schedule was established and approved by the School of Medicine to defray the operational costs for the Service Center. Such costs include salary support for the Center Director, staff biostatistician and graduate research assistants, as well as overhead costs associated with Center operation (e.g. computers, printers, computer service contracts, software license fees, general consumable office supplies). The hourly rate for July 1, 2021– June 30, 2022 is $80 per hour for services provided by staff biostatisticians and database manager with faculty oversight; services include a free initial consultation. The rate schedule may be updated in 2022. A good-faith estimate of minimal service-hours required to fulfill a user’s request will be provided during the initial consultation after a thorough discussion with the service user.

Funding/Billing

Funding sources may include:

• funds from clinical surpluses
• hospitalist scholar funds
• NIH grants
• private foundation grants
• gift/discretionary accounts

Before services will commence, the service user must provide their budget administrator’s contact information. The identified budget administrator should actively manage the planned source of funding and be prepared to provide details upon receipt of invoice. Billing will be done via a direct fund transfer and invoice statements will be forwarded to users (with a copy to their budget administrator) no less than quarterly.

Authorship and Acknowledgements

The Service Center aims to encourage multidisciplinary collaboration across diverse content areas. Faculty and research assistants in the Center often contribute as research collaborators rather than solely as service providers. Therefore, the Center adapted the authorship policy from JAMA and the Annals of Internal Medicine as general guidelines. Core faculty and research assistants are expected to be listed as authors if they have contributed directly to the intellectual content of the paper, and meet all three of the following criteria:

• substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; and
• drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
• final approval of the version to be published

Holding positions of administrative leadership (e.g., Center Director), and collecting and preparing the data for analysis (e.g., Data Collectors), however important to the research, are not, by themselves, criteria for authorship. The manuscript should note in the Acknowledgments section people who made substantial, direct contributions to the work but did not meet the criteria for authorship. Here are some examples:

Drs. A and B are supported by the NIDDK Diabetes Research and Training Center (P60 DK079637).

The authors are grateful for statistical support contributed by Dr. xxx, who is supported by a grant from the NIDDK Diabetes Research and Training Center (P60 DK079637).

This work was supported in part by the Johns Hopkins General Internal Medicine Methods Core.

We acknowledge methodological consultation provided by Dr. xxx, Core Faculty of the Johns Hopkins General Internal Medicine Methods Core.

Management Team

The Service Center is directed by Dr. Hsin-Chieh (Jessica) Yeh.  A Senior Research Service Analyst will monitor the services finances and track all reimbursements/transfers.