Today I completed a project of which I am very proud. On Wednesday of last week, I was asked to look over information concerning a grant that the Medical Society wanted to apply for. I had a small meeting with a co-worker, and he explained to me exactly what the grant was for, and why the Medical Society wanted to obtain it.
The grant was basically for a certain number of coupons to a web service online called DocSite. The site is for physicians who have not yet obtained an electronic medical record keeper, or an EMR. This EMR helps the doctors keep track of their patients records on a computer, instead of having paper records and charts. The Medical Society wanted these coupons to help some of their physicians who do not yet have an EMR, to try it out to see if they like it. This would also save them a 2% amount on their yearly charges, so it ends up helping the physicians.
To obtain the grant, I needed to answer three in depth questions about what we wanted to use the coupons for, what we would do with them, how we would screen applicants for these coupons, and how would we help our physicians use this site. When I was being briefed on the grant itself, I took many notes to help me answer the questions. I faced a small challenge because I literally had no idea about why the physicians would need this. Also, I was told to include as much as I could on the MSD VIP service. VIP stands for Voluntary Initiative Program and this programs consists of physicians who treat and prescribe medicine for those without Medicare/Medicaid or those with no insurance. I needed to include this group in the grant because these doctors would mostly be the ones who benefited from the program.
So, I asked as many questions as I could about why MSD needed these, what the VIP program was, and what the benefits of EMRs were. I was trying to gain as much information as I could to compose something I didn't have previous information about. After, I did this, I went back to my office and looked up VIP on the Medical Society's website. I looked up the DocSite website and looked through all of their information. This was really helpful to me.
When I began composing the grant, I included as much as I could. I decided to write it from a factual standpoint. I've had no experience writing grants, so I simply just tried to point out all the reasons that our doctors would benefit from receiving these coupons. I included the VIP program, and tried to make clear what these doctors did, because its a very admirable program to begin with.
When I reached the last question, which was "How will you aid your physicians in using the DocSite program", I had to call on my previous research. I was proud of this because my co-worker, who had given me this project, wasn't quite sure what to do with this question. But since I had been on the DocSite website and thoroughly looked around, I found several useful tools that I included. Besides writing that we would aid the physicians by becoming familiar with the program ourselves, I added that we would post links to the DocSite Webinar and demo, which would walk our physicians through the entire process. There was even a free trial to begin tracking 30 patients, so that the physicians could actually begin to tentatively use it.
After I finished up the grant, I sent it to several co-workers who gave me feedback and opinions. Then I complied all of those opinions and revised my draft. Then I sent it back. It's been looked over several times and I think that it will be sent soon. I won't know if I actually got the grant for MSD before I leave the internship, but they've promised to let me know if they do receive it.
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Again, great work in terms of provide a through, detailed description of the process you followed to produce this project. You obviously gained lots of valuable insight and information through your conversations with your co-workers; your discussion here makes me think back to English 301, in which your project (I hope!) helped you to think about interviewing as one tool in the PWE's research repertoire. Your experience with this grant, even more so than the 301 project, should help you to appreciate what types of information you can glean from interviews and how you can put this information to use as you work on writing projects.
ReplyDeleteAnother aspect of your discussion that I'm thinking about--in what ways were you creating ethos, logos, and pathos appeals in the grant. What strategies were you using to create each one? Given your audience and your purpose, why did you feel like certain types of appeals would be effective at different points throughout the text? For example, you say that you "included the VIP program, and tried to make clear what these doctors did, because its a very admirable program to begin with." When you're suggesting how "very admirable" the program is, you seem to be suggesting that you were looking to create a pathos and/or an ethos appeal here. Is that the case? And if so, what specifically did you do in order to create a pathos or ethos appeal?