With the new year, the Academy has joined leading health research funders, in using the Health Research Classification System (HRCS) a standardised system to categorise health research projects.
The system provides research funders such as the Academy with a strategic overview of their funding and allows for more precise assessments of the financial and social benefits of investing in medical research on a national level.
HRCS was developed by the UK Clinical Research Collaboration (UKCRC) Partners, of which the Academy is a partner, to cover unequivocally the full spectrum of research across all the areas of health and disease and to provide a common language to allow comparisons across funders and portfolios.
The system classifies research awards individually and more precisely identifies them based on their main research objectives. It is openly available and provides a simple set of rules to classify every piece of health research, based on a two level approach, health categories and specific research activity codes within them.
The 21 individual health categories are based on WHO's International Categorisation of Diseases, while the 48 Research Activity Codes are built on cancer's Common Scientific Outline.
More information on the Health Research Classification System is available on the HRCS website.