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Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Research

What Is NUcore?

NUcore is a transaction processing system that permits shared facilities to accept and track orders and to bill for their services. NUcore was developed by the Feinberg Research Office in collaboration with the NU Office for Research and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. There is no charge for using NUcore, and it is available to all research-related organizations at NU. The program is supported by a full-time application support specialist.

NUcore is designed to meet the needs of the three broad groups that it serves:

  • Customers
    NUcore allows customers to purchase items, request services and schedule instruments. Users can also log in to check order status, review current and previous charges, and manage their payment sources without the need to contact a core facility. NUcore user accounts and payment sources (chart strings) are universal and may be used in any facility enrolled in NUcore.
  • Core Directors and Staff
    NUcore is specifically designed to reduce the administrative burden on facility managers and directors. Chart strings are validated to prevent billed items from failing to post in NU Financials. Journals are assembled and transmitted electronically, without manual calculation or formatting. Northwestern accounts use NETID authentication (external user accounts are also available). Real-time reports provide summaries based on common and user-defined parameters.
  • Department / Center / University Administrators
    Specific roles within NUcore allow administrators to manage multiple users and payment sources (e.g. investigators within a department or center). A COGNOS datamart also resides over the NUcore database, with direct connections to University reporting and data visualization tools. These interfaces provide advanced reporting across multiple facilities, precluding labor-intensive retrieval and collating of data.

NUcore remains under active development, with updates and new features released bi-weekly. New feature requests are prioritized by need—in most cases, features that benefit multiple cores will take precedence over requests that target a single core.