The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) maintains a central data repository with health information from the electronic medical records of over 9 million Veterans in the United States.

• Data fields include (but are not limited to) age, gender, race, ethnicity, zip code, dates of outpatient and inpatient encounters, conditions, procedures, lab results, vital signs, medications, prescription refills, radiology reports, costs, vital status, location of care, and national provider identification number.
• Data files from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), including the Medicare Chronic Conditions Warehouse, are also available.

The CHIME VA Data Core:

• Provides consultation regarding data elements available in the national VA Corporate Data Warehouse and VA/CMS files.
• Assists with identifying, extracting, and merging variables of interest.
• Ensures that use of VHA data meets all regulatory requirements.
• Provides analytic support for projects using national VA and/or VA/CMS data.
• Does not provide analytic support for PI-assembled or hand-curated datasets.

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Steps required to access VA data for clinical research

Once access to the data is obtained, the San Francisco VA data core can help you identify and extract data fields of interest (e.g., age, ICD-10 code, vital status). However, it will not provide data cleaning (e.g., eliminate illogical data), perform analyses (e.g., calculate average age of patients with diagnosis of interest) or run statistical models (e.g., evaluate association between lab value and mortality).

Using VA Data for Research

VA Information Resource Center (VIReC)

VA Informatics and Computing Infrastructure (VINCI)