Tools & Strategies News

VA Broadens Clinical Data Access to Improve Patient Outcomes

The VA is expanding clinical data access to support suicide prevention, chronic disease management, and precision medicine efforts, resulting in better patient outcomes.

VA broadens clinical data access to improve patient outcomes

Source: Thinkstock

By Jessica Kent

- The Veterans Health Administration Innovation Ecosystem (VHA IE), a division of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), is partnering with MDClone to enhance patient outcomes by increasing clinical data access.

The collaboration will aim to provide secure access to clinical data to help leaders better understand and improve the health of the more than nine million veterans the VA serves.

The VHA IE works to empower a wider network of VHA clinical and operational staff to explore data and discover insights, which can be used to improve the lives of veterans across the country. The program is focused on testing and refining innovative care models and transformative initiatives that can meaningfully impact veteran care.

Through the MDClone platform, non-technical users can quickly ask important questions, find answers, and take action. This will significantly shorten timelines for quality improvement, innovation, and grass roots clinical research. Initially, the partnership will focus on suicide prevention, chronic disease management, precision medicine, health equity, and COVID-19.

“The VHA has long been at the forefront of healthcare informatics and the use of data to improve patient outcomes and drive operational improvements,” said Ziv Ofek, Founder and CEO, MDClone.

“The selection of MDClone’s unique platform builds upon this tradition. With one of the largest medical databases in the world, the VHA requires enterprise scale tools to explore data, innovate, and improve patient care. MDClone’s dynamic environment will help VA staff deliver on their mission to provide the best healthcare services to Veterans across the US.”

Leaders will protect veterans’ privacy and health information by using synthetic data, a technology that surpasses traditional de-identification methods. Synthetic data is not linked to real people, events, or circumstances. The information is instead generated through computer programs that mirror real-world information by observing attributes of real data. Synthetic datasets can be reliable and accurate when based on trends and traits of real data.

“Synthetic health data has all the characteristics of health records – such as information about blood pressure, diabetes, weight and illnesses – without personally identifiable information, like names, social security numbers and contact information,” Amanda Purnell, VHA senior innovation fellow, wrote in a blog post.

“Synthetic data is different from de-identified data, which simply hides attached identities but still uses real Veteran information. It has been shown that de-identification is time consuming, difficult, and may still carry the risk of re-identification with modern computing techniques. With synthetic data, there are no identities to hide.”

Many VHA initiatives leverage synthetic data, including its AI Challenge to create predictive models for COVID-19 in veteran populations. For veterans, this leads to improved patient outcomes and ensured security of their personal health information.

“Given how health care is evolving, AI is really the only way to move forward in terms of reducing costs and providing better care. AI is key to really taking advantage of data to help Veterans and potentially others, as well,” said Dr. Gil Alterovitz, director of artificial intelligence at the VA and leader of the National Artificial Intelligence Institute (NAII).

By using synthetic data, leaders will expand access to clinical data and accelerate innovation across the VA. Synthetic data also has the potential to help the VHA collaborate with external agencies, healthcare providers, and industry.

“VA is constantly looking forward, innovating with the goal of improving Veteran care. Synthetic data allows data scientists to simulate events or circumstances that have not yet happened in the real world but might in the future. Where real data does not exist, synthetic data can create and test how different interventions may work if certain real-word events happen, like a future pandemic,” Purnell concluded.

“As VA continues to innovate using synthetic data, there will be greater opportunities to partner with health technology and research companies to find new ways to train VA providers and improve Veteran healthcare.”