Role of CIMIT Site MinersBack to Site Miners Page

CIMIT Site Miners are a critical element in how the consortium identifies and connects clinical champions with scientists and technologies. Site Miners are well-established professionals on the staff or faculty of the CIMIT Member institutions (the "Site"). These individuals are paid by the Site (on a part-time basis) to serve as a liaison between the Site and the CIMIT Consortium.

The Site Miner is a scout, mentor, project manager, matchmaker, dealmaker, visionary, and reality tester. Each strives to improve connectivity between clinicians with unsolved clinical problems and scientists/engineers with potentially useful technology. The overarching responsibility of the Site Miner is to ensure that the Site benefits from all expertise and resources of CIMIT and to guarantee each Site is thoroughly mined for opportunities to rapidly translate enabling technology into healthcare. Click to contact CIMIT Site Miners from member institutions.

Vision
The Vision of a site miner should be aligned with the CIMIT vision, with the caveat that, from each Site Miner's perspective, their home institution will be the playing field to nurture the CIMIT vision. Thus, the mission of the Site Miner for a hospital should be to foster and improve connectivity between physicians at their site and scientists/engineers with innovative, adaptive technology capable of producing solutions. For the technical sites (MIT, Draper Labs, Boston University), the focus is on seeking out potential physician collaborators who have clinical problems that could be solved through the technology and expertise of their scientists and technologists.

Goals
The Goals of each Site Miner should include 1) forming new interactions; 2) facilitating, sustaining, and nurturing existing successful interactions; 3) developing new programs and initiatives; and 4) assuring sustainability (programmatic success should transcend individuals).

Methods
The Methods to accomplish these goals include 1) developing and implementing strategies that identify and pair appropriate clinicians and clinical problems with potentially applicable new technologies and corresponding scientists/engineers; 2) conducting interviews with key individuals and representatives from important constituencies (clinical services, laboratories, programs); 3) casting a wide net by actively communicating (presentations, telephone calls, email, web page, newsletters); 4) organizing educational and "intake" workshops/roundtables for new, junior potential clinician-investigators who have identified problems, but who lack the experience to define each problem and make the case for its clinical importance; and 5) working closely with other Site Miner colleagues to identify potential partners for their clinical or technical investigators.

Metrics, Measures of Success, and Milestones
Metrics, Measures of Success, and Milestones, include the successful completion of the goals listed above: specifically, completing interviews with key people by predetermined deadlines, developing methodologies for identifying appropriate clinicians and suitable technologies and owners, cultivating potential collaborations to the point of fundability as measured by grant application and funding, facilitating investigator progress that culminates in publications, patents, and the successful transition towards commercialization. Equally important is the Site Miner's ability to successfully forge and maintain strong, enduring, mutually beneficial ties throughout the CIMIT Consortium.

Barriers to Success
It is crucial to be proactive in identifying potential and real barriers to success, in order to develop strategies to remove them, or at least minimize their impact. Some of these barriers include distance (space and time), language barriers (the vocabulary of physicians versus the language of engineers), cultural differences (clinicians versus technologists), administrative disconnects, and resource allocations. Some of the Methods listed above ease the adverse effects of many barriers; others can be mitigated through careful planning, attention to detail, and maintaining focus on the vision and the goal.

A Home Run
A "home run" may be defined as the successful clinical adoption of a truly disruptive technology. The reward for a CIMIT Site Miner is contributing to a community that is unusually bold, innovative, risk-tolerant and where the collective efforts will have an enormous impact on patient care.