COIN: Informatics, Decision-Enhancement, and Analytic Sciences (IDEAS); Salt Lake City, UT

Matthew Samore, MD, Director
Michael Rubin, MD, PhD and Susan Zickmund, PhD Associate Directors

Welcome to IDEAS

Informatics, Decision-Enhancement, and Analytic Sciences (IDEAS) is a VA Health Systems Research Center of Innovation located in Salt Lake City, Utah. The mission of the Informatics, Decision-Enhancement, and Analytic Sciences (IDEAS) Center of Innovation is to advance scientific discovery, implement novel interventions, promote cross-center collaboration, increase research capacity, and engage Veterans and operational partners to improve Veteran health. IDEAS seeks to drive the transformation or health care delivery in Veterans Health Administration (VHA) through an integrated portfolio of transitional research, specifically to apply qualitative and quantitative methods of inquiry to elicit stakeholder perspectives, characterize clinical gaps, and identify information needs.

• Generate new knowledge to improve prediction of impacts of health system changes, to support clinical practice improvement, and to guide mitigation of adverse outcomes in Veterans.
• Design and implement innovative solutions to high priority problems, advancing VHA as a learning health system.
• Collaborate with operational partners to disseminate interventions that enhance the quality, efficiency and safety of health care delivery in VHA and improve Veteran health.

Informatics is the unifying theme for our Center. Biomedical informatics is an interdisciplinary field that aims to improve health through effective use of information to advance knowledge, solve problems, and enhance decision making. Many of our investigators are both health services researchers and informaticians, an overlap that reflects the historical prominence of informatics at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Salt Lake City (SLC) Health Care System and our close academic affiliate, University of Utah (U of U) Health. IDEAS is home to 52 investigators, including VA Career Development Awardees, VA Research Career Scientists, and post-doctoral fellows in informatics, health services research, and addiction medicine. Nearly 40 data specialists work in specific projects and method cores, and our strong administrative core staff is devoted to advancing health services research and informatics.

Impact Goals and Priorities

Our conceptual framework represents Health Systems Research as a cyclical process in which we use informatics and other strategic methodologies to generate new knowledge about problems in care and clinical effectiveness, which then leads to development of candidate solutions and tools. Novel interventions and informatics tools are disseminated in implementation studies and achieve impact by engaging Veterans, providers, and partners. We propose these impact goals to achieve our mission:

1. Improve Veteran healthcare quality and safety by advancing the science of biomedical informatics and by implementing innovative, evidence-based informatics solutions to promote VA’s ability to learn as a system. We address high priority challenges such as optimizing enrollment and retention of Veterans in VHA and enhancing electronic health record (EHR) safety before, during, and after EHR modernization. Our development and implementation of informatics innovations extends to multiple challenges in clinical care.
2. Examine, reimagine, and reinvent services for medically vulnerable Veterans to improve access, quality of care, and system efficiencies within new clinical environments. By implementing new models of care, we broaden access to evidence-based treatments for Veterans. We will expand our portfolio of large-scale investigational and operational-funded projects on opioid use disorder (OUD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) to address emerging problems and to extend our approach to related disorders.

3. Develop, implement, and evaluate VHA programmatic and clinical interventions to identify and address Veterans’ social risks and unmet social needs to improve health. Building on current projects, we will evolve toward larger scale implementation studies to address housing and food insecurity, as well as minority Veteran distrust in VA and disparities in hypertension management. New enterprise data resources will be created.

Additional Contribution Areas: Our Family Caregiving research tackles complex chronic care, disability, long-term care, and aging in Veterans. Our research in Community Care provides VA policy makers with data and tools to optimize resource allocations for care delivery within and outside the VA healthcare system.

Innovation & Emerging Areas: Our emerging areas of Genomic Health Services and Cardiovascular Epidemiology enhance

Questions about the HSR website? Email the Web Team

Any health information on this website is strictly for informational purposes and is not intended as medical advice. It should not be used to diagnose or treat any condition.