“VA has several platforms and dashboards that provide data to tens of thousands of users across the field to support health care operations and benefit delivery. Over the past decade, traditional data warehouse technologies and schemas have supported these activities, primarily through VA’s corporate data warehouse. Now VA is investing in advanced analytic tools and modern cloud infrastructure to move away from the traditional, siloed approach of data management and more toward a self-service, low-code/no-code approach that enables VA to unlock the value of data, provide timely insights and improve visual dashboards.
‘VA’s corporate data warehouse has been the bread and butter for our data dashboarding for the last 15 years. Over the last two years, we’ve really been focused on modernizing our data analytics ecosystem and looking at leveraging native cloud capabilities, SaaS products and more modern architecture and tools to drive faster time to insights,’ Denise Kitts, VA’s Chief Data Technology Officer, told GovCIO Media & Research…”
“’VA uses VistA as our electronic health record, where data is already stored in digital for format, but health care data is complex — it’s nuanced. So we rely heavily on subject matter experts to be deeply involved in the process of cleaning the data and transferring the data into accurate insights,’ Kitts said.
Once VA digitizes data, cloud-based tools and technologies are helping to process the data and display the visualization. This is where natural language processing is helping to extract insights from unstructured data, like clinical notes from EHRs…”
“Over the past year, DOD and VA have partnered to develop the joint data analytics strategy and plan of action from an enterprise approach. The plan is to share insights and machine-learning models, and also develop a joint data catalog to document where data lies within the two departments.
‘We’re taking a step back — we’re looking at regulations, policies and laws that have been in place for a number of years, if not decades now — to see if they are limiting the sharing what’s happening between the two departments and try to optimize the data sharing,’ Kitts said. One success from VA’s data efforts was the launch of the COVID Patient Manager, which uses real-time clinical data to assist emergency room doctors in determining the appropriate disposition and treatment for people with COVID-19. The SMART on FHIR application integrates with VA’s both Cerner and VistA EHRs…” Read the full article here.
Source: Inside VA’s Data Visualization Strategy – By Sarah Sybert, April 15, 2022. GovCIO.
