“Today the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced the recent start of a new partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to improve public health surveillance data. Specifically, VA will support CDC’s Modernizing Death Reporting project by integrating patient mortality data from VA’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) system.”
“A component of vital statistics, mortality data provides a critical view of the overall health of the nation. Moreover, mortality data identifies important variables for those dying in the U.S., assisting with the modeling of population life expectancy and cross-comparisons for health factors. VA’s collaboration with CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics marks a shift in the way that mortality data has traditionally been provided, increasing the speed of data transmission and mitigating any loss of data value due to decreased interoperability.”
“VA believes that open, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)-based Advanced Programming Interfaces (APIs) form an essential component of a modern interoperability strategy. To that end, VA is committed to working collaboratively to expand available FHIR resources and their utilization.”
“CDC has been hard at work to increase the speed, quality and interoperability of mortality data captured and reported, and this new collaboration with VA further enables the advancement of this important work…” Read the full press release here.
Source: VA announces mortality data collaboration with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – February 7, 2019. VA.gov.
