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VA healthcare is driven by the learning health system model, in which data from patient care is collected and analyzed to generate new knowledge that informs and improves future care – and by seeking and supplying that knowledge, VA’s Health Systems Research has played a leading role in making VA a learning health system.
Older Veterans often experience sudden declines and sometimes improvements that can fragment care as they move between VA and community providers paid through VA, Medicare or private insurers. The data generated throughout this continuum of care is a potentially rich resource for evaluating and improving VA’s geriatrics and extended care, but integrating data from these different systems is a major technical and logistical challenge.
Orna Intrator, PhD
This was the problem Orna Intrator, PhD, set out to solve when she established the Geriatrics and Extended Care Data Analysis Center (GECDAC) in 2012. “It’s a big mess to integrate that data,” she said. “But by overlooking what these Veterans are using outside the VA, people are missing a lot of the picture.” GECDAC’s flagship products, the Residential History Files (RHFs), use data from VA, Medicare, Medicaid, and community providers to provide daily summaries of individual Veterans’ health service utilization and locations of care.
Among the services they provide, GECDAC staff can make available project-specific RHFs tailored to the requests of qualified VA personnel—for example, to follow a patient cohort with shared characteristics over a given period. In the years since its founding, the center has rolled out additional data products and services in support of VA decision making and research.
From the Data Sources Overview page of the VHA Data Portal (available within the VA network at vaww.vhadataportal.med.va.gov/Data-Sources/Data-Sources-Overview), investigators and operations analysts can access summary information, guidebooks, workbooks, and details associated with three GECDAC products:
For questions about accessing GECDAC data, researchers should first review the information in the VHA Data Portal. Specific follow-up questions about access can be sent to the VA Information Resource Center (VIReC): virec@va.gov.
For Further Information
Click here to learn more about how to use GECDAC’s curated and value-added data infrastructure for health systems research, or contact the center at GECDAC@va.gov.
To stay informed about GECDAC’s regularly scheduled educational seminars, contact Carolyn Hursh at the Boston Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center (GRECC): Carolyn.Hursh@va.gov.
