“In the era of big data, there aren’t many public entities with bigger data than the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). The nation’s largest integrated health care network, serving about 9 million veterans, was an early adopter of electronic medical records, beginning in the 1970s. This digital platform has evolved over the years and now constitutes an electronic health record that contains inpatient and outpatient diagnoses and procedures, lab results, prescriptions, and other veteran medical data. In total, VHA has compiled more than 78 billion records from all of its VA medical centers.”
“At the same time, the VHA’s groundbreaking efforts to understand how genes affect health and illness continue to grow. The most prominent of these efforts, the Million Veteran Program (MVP), was launched in 2011 to learn how genes, lifestyle, and military exposures interact to affect health and illness. To date, about 850,000 veteran volunteers have donated genetic samples – vials of blood – to aid in studies that look for associations between genes and medical record data, as well as self-reported survey data on lifestyle and military exposures…”
“When the international Human Genome Project showed how to map the entire sequence of chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, it opened the door to a new kind of investigation: the genome-wide association study, or GWAS, in which entire genomes from a large cohort of people are scanned for common genetic variations. With the help of powerful supercomputers, investigators discovered which genes appear in one group – such as people with breast cancer – and not another…”
“Putting data to work for veterans is one of the strategic priorities identified by the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Office of Research and Development (ORD) in the department’s 2021 budget proposal – an acknowledgement that the vast, rich datasets at the VA’s disposal are resources that remain largely untapped. Because these datasets hold information that will benefit veterans and all Americans, VA is taking steps to accelerate the pace at which this data can be discovered, extracted, and used for research that will unlock advances in precision medicine…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA Research: Putting Data to Work for Veterans – By Craig Collins, May 6, 2020. Defense Media Network.
