Annual EMSC Grantee Meeting

Grant Results and Products

June 20 – 22, 2006

MARSHA TREIBER: Again because we didn't budget so much for dissemination originally created our own student manual and instructor’s manual, found that it was a lot cheaper to do it on CDs, which is definitely more acceptable to prehospital providers. And then we did videos ourselves as well. And because we didn't have a budget for that, we were fortunate that one of our project coordinator had connections with Virginia EMS, and she was very good at getting things for free, and we got all of our videos done at no cost to us.

And in exchange we provided education for the state of Virginia. So our videos which are actually going to be incorporated in our tool kit were done for free and we got ownership of it so we were fortunate. Again, we published in last fall and what this entails is taking your materials. And they have to be substantially different than what it was that you produced under the grant. So we completely updated the book and we wrote a lot of it, you know, in order to update it and do it in a different style.

This involves working with an editor and within the confines of that particular editor and publisher. And the same thing with the tool kit, which is done, thankfully, and should be submitted this week.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Terry, can I ask you a question?

TERRY ADIRIM: Sure.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Was the reason that the formatting the instructors and student's manual was changed as was submitted as the TI grant product, was that something that the publishers request that they wanted to have something different so they could copy write it and know one else would be able to come up with the same stuff because it was different or was there another reason?

TERRY ADIRIM: They wanted to own the material. So actually I didn't want them to own the material. So we actually had joint ownership. That was one of the things we negotiated. And it wasn't at their request, but because we wanted to publish it and sell it and so on, we did revise it and do it in a format that they had requested and they have expertise in prehospital education. So we, you know, took what they had to tell us about their, that they published, and so they wanted it in a certain format. So we followed that and that's how we ‑‑ and I think there were some rules. Correct me if I'm wrong, that you can't just take the materials that you created under your grant and then publish that for money.

So that's why we revised our program.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Excuse me. Is that a contractual obligation not to sell your product.

TERRY ADIRIM: You mean with EMS? No.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Because I've worked on government grants for a long time, and a lot of people just take whatever their final report, product was and publish it.

MARSHA TREIBER I think the little piece that's missing in there is that, yes, you can go ahead and publish it. But the government still has, retains the right to it because they paid for it, its development. And they can print it any time they want.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Does it remain in the public domain, you're saying?

TERRY ADIRIM: It does. Technically they have rights over it.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: (Inaudible) submit to the government, that version is in the public domain.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: I know that.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: So you get distributed, go into the warehouse.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: I've seen people put copy write S on it.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: But the copyright does protect you from everybody but the government. So you have the right to say, there are intellectual property rules that say you created it; it's yours. Your agreement to be grant funded is you also give the government the right to distribute it. But it's only the version that you give to them.

So if you give them your 1.0, and you go on to make 1.1 and 2, that's exactly what happened with PEP. It was done under a grant. We have the manual. We all have it. I have my historical copy. When you look at it today, it's a completely different document. And the government isn't chasing them saying shouldn't do that. But so those are the rules.

TERRY ADIRIM: Right and on the other hand you can't acknowledge, if you're version 1.2, whatever version that's not what you submitted to the government, you're not supposed to use any of the, you're not supposed to acknowledge the funding. You're not supposed to use their logos, because they're not ‑‑

MIKE TUNI: So I think that we did have a section at the end on ownership and I'm glad people are interested in that. But I do think that you can do what you want if you produce something. But there's a risk if you don't change it that the government can do something, too. Now, if it wasn't in the grant funding, you know, unless it's a very hot item, they might not do anything. But if you're working with the publisher and the intent is to, for the publishers to distribute and make some money through the sale, they're not going to take a risk that someone else might get a copy of it for five bucks when they're selling it for whatever, because the government decided to reproduce a lot more of them.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: That's exactly what I wanted to know. But I also know that there's talk about, you know, putting it in the grant contract that you're not allowed to publish it.

Talked about that in other areas.

MIKE TUNIK: I've not heard anything, and I'll turn to Dan, who is in the back. I've not heard any discussion that there's going to be something in the ‑‑

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: I didn't mean to infer it had anything to do with EMS. I just meant that I have known other grantees in other areas that have done such a thing. That's why I was asking.

MIKE TUNIK: But there was something in the contract that said they couldn't?

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Right. And of course towards the end we were talking about having the contract specifically say no, you may not. MARSHA TREIBER except there's a difference between a federal contract and a federal grant.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: These were grantees. I worked for the federal contract. They were grantees.

TERRY ADIRIM: The bottom line if you can hit a hyperlink off a website and print out the materials, then why bother buying it from the publisher. So there's that, too.

MIKE TUNIK: Were there other questions about interacting with publishers, tips or tricks, negotiations with the publishers, Terry had some experience with that that we at CPEM don't, that people might be interested in, if you're thinking of taking a product to a publisher.

TERRY ADIRIM: Get everything in writing. Negotiate everything. Even like what colors you want, like how you want things. Anticipate things that can ‑‑ because those are important. One of the things we didn't anticipate was for the textbook, a lot of the photos, because our particular students manual that we had created has lots of photos and figures. And necessity kind of like make you go get the permission for a lot of these things.

So it's, you have to discuss those things up front.

MIKE TUNIK: That's certainly a big chunk of work if the publisher is doing it for you or you're doing it.

Other questions about working with publishers?

So some of this is what we already discussed. I'll skip through it if we did. So EMSC grant product must be submitted to the granting agency at the end of the grant. And as we discussed, you can modify your product, copyright the modified product and work with the publisher or manufacturer to sell that modified and copyrighted product. So just because there's an original doesn't mean that there might not be two lives, if you will, to the EMSC grant product.

And one of the things which you heard earlier, I think it's very important, is that there are now new federal guidelines for grant products that they cannot be disseminating grant funded products. Contracts which are extremely different than grants, they're very tightly budgeted. You know you're supposed to do something in a particularly tight time frame, much different from the grant, TI grants that many of you are used to.

If you produce a grant product, you are going to have to reproduce it and disseminate it yourself. That's really the bottom line. And so I encourage everyone to think about mechanisms within the grant that you write up, budgeting it and how you're going to go about doing it, because I think that the grants are going to be assessed if you're looking for a disseminated product, on the effective and cost‑effective dissemination plan that you're writing up.

So that's a warning, is that it's not going to be done, unfortunately, by EMSC and RC anymore. It may take a little bit more out of your budget. But I think if your primary goal is to get things out there, I hope that some of the examples you've been hearing about today have demonstrated that it can be done within a TI grant budget.

And only contract products can be federally distributed. And that's because those undergo an extensive review. Probably six months worth of review depending on

the agency.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Clearance.

MIKE TUNIK: Clearance. So we planned for reproducing advertising, if you want to use that term. It's essentially what it is. Get ‑‑ people need to know you're out there and how to get a hold of your product and how to distribute it. And again remember that warehousing and Raider's of the lost arc, you have a great product but it's sitting in obscurity because you didn't plan on the distribution, you know, a lot of time, effort, blood sweat and tiers went into something that may be excellent, but if it's not out there, it's not having the impact that you want it to.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: You can put it on eBay.

MIKE TUNIK: Put it on eBay. I haven't seen many EMSC products on eBay yet.

TERRY ADIRIM: That's the point websites aren't that expensive.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: It's driving people to your website that's the issue.

MIKE TUNIK: That's the issue. So some of our recommendations as a summary is to collaborate with the end user or organizations that are going to be interested in your product, because once they have buy in, because they helped you develop it and they help you produce it, they're going to want to make sure they get it. To produce that dissemination plan and budget for the reproduction and dissemination, both during and after the grant period. So websites are not that expensive.

So if you basically say that you're going to maintain a website for two years or three years after your grant cycle is over, and the website is only costing $50 or $100 a month, that's not that difficult to budget into the grant. If you could pay for the website ahead of time. I don't know about leftover funds. That may be a little bit of a sticky point, but I think you may be able to negotiate something with your web, you know, the people who are doing your web serving or your university or medical school to make sure that the material is maintained.

And I think that that's a big bonus. If you've got something there and people are using it and all of a sudden the website goes down because your grant is over. That, for a relatively small amount of money, that's a pretty big oops.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Just to clarify. You're saying that you could, you know, in the latter part of your year three TI grant you could conceivably go out and get a three‑year additional contract with web providers.

MIKE TUNIK: Yeah.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Keep you up and running for three to five years.

MIKE TUNIK: That's what I would be looking for. That they would maintain the material and the website with that bandwidth, that you know that was talked about yesterday, so that people can keep downloading and accessing your material.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: That's different than maintaining the information on the site. So it can go on (inaudible) it won't be updated unless you budget that in (inaudible).

MIKE TUNIK: Right. There's a big difference between static stuff that hasn't changed for three years on a website and saying oh, my God, the American Heart Association has changed their guidelines, so the, all the heart material in the education has to be updated. That's very time and expensive.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Let me put something out there maybe because we do (inaudible) work for other people, maybe it's time for us to have a Wikipedia type of thing where the community updates it.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: (Inaudible).

(Laughter)

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: All the information will go right down the toilet. No peer review. Anybody can put anything up there that they wanted.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Doesn't it get corrected every day by the people who ‑‑

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: (Inaudible) they have like about 100 editors that actually go through the materials.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: They didn't used to.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: It has that flare of purity.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: They didn't until they got criticized.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: What I like on this, say you can secure additional contract for the website, is there anything then that prohibits you to subcontract with a party for a three‑year period and keep it updated after it's ‑‑

MIKE TUNIK: I think that part of ‑‑ maybe we should make a comment about updates. As was mentioned yesterday, you know Dr. Sapien's presentation on web based education, there are several hours of videoing, for example, that go into one hour of video that you present. There are several hours ever development of the educational materials that go into every hour of web based education. There were hundreds of hours that went into development of each of these trips, paramedic trips, child abuse resource and the scope, and if someone said to me, well, in your copious free time would you like to update this, I would probably have two responses.

One response would be: Yes, because I want it to be updated and I want it to be used that's why I put the blood, sweat and tears in the first place. My other response would be to get nauseated because of the amount of work that I have to do and if nobody is recompensing you for that work, it is very dicey as to whether the product is going to be updated. I'll be blunt about that.

So I think that you may not need a full targeted issue grant to update a product, but you certainly need a big enough chunk of money for a year two or half. It's not an insignificant effort. And I don't have a good answer as to how every one of the products that's been developed is going to be maintained. But what I will say, it's my opinion if you have a product that's well distributed and well liked and widely used, you might have a much better chance at obtaining funding to get it updated. And I'll leave it at that.

I think we talked about the changes in federal regulations and that was really the last slide. Are there any other questions or comments about the presentation?

If not, thank you very much for your participation.

(Applause).

And please fill out the pink form and hand it, Isabelle will you collect them. Hand it to Isabelle.