Analyzing NIH KL2 Outcomes: A Pilot Study Using Administrative Data

Background: The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds “K” awards that provide both resources and access to mentoring believed to be invaluable for early career faculty. The KL2 Mentored Career Development Award trains early-career clinicians with the goal of guiding scholars toward an independent clinical and translational research career. This study presents the pilot of a systematic, low-burden method to examine scientific and career outcomes for these awardees, applying a novel set of linked administrative data. Methods: Clinical and Translational Science Award hubs administering KL2 awards at ten universities who participate in the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) provided names of scholars in their KL2 cohorts. Using extensive data on sponsored projects which IRIS member universities provide, we linked the KL2 scholars to information on subsequent publication, patent, and grant activity. Results: Analyses of linked data supported a rigorous, sustainable, low-cost approach to examining career outcomes. A subset of key metrics identified by CTSA evaluators were operationalized as an examination of the post-award careers of KL2 awardees. We successfully identified contemporaneous faculty with different NIH K Awards to use as comparison groups. The pilot culminated in university-specific and aggregate reporting to all participating hubs. Conclusions: This pilot demonstrates that substantive evaluations of early career programs are possible using administrative data from universities with low additional burden. Integration of research on career development outcomes offer new means to examine the effects of increasingly diverse funding, team, and collaborative network structures, advancing both knowledge about the workings of science and practices to support early career faculty. This approach could be extended to support rigorous multi-institutional evaluation and research on a range of student and faculty training mechanisms.