Supporting Complex Care
Veteran healthcare can be complex, and their health records are often scattered across several points of care. To provide the best care, providers need medical histories aggregated from Veterans Affairs Medical Centers (VAMC), military treatment facilities, and community care providers.
To address this information sharing challenge, we are working with Veterans Affairs (VA) and our partners to implement InterSystems based solutions across VA.
A complete picture of every patient with VDIF
Veterans Data Integration and Federation (VDIF) is one such project. It aggregates and normalizes clinical data across Veterans Health Administration System electronic health records.
With VDIF, clinicians can access a Veteran's entire medical history or just relevant parts from a single view. They can stay focused on their patients, rather than sifting through multiple sites to find the clinical data they need.
VDIF’s aggregated, longitudinal health record enables veterans to take their entire care history with them outside Veterans Administration medical centers — for care at a private hospital, for example.
This is a realization of the 2018 MISSION Act and Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act of 2014, laws that streamline Veteran access to healthcare from outside providers.
VDIF also:
- Gives other applications in the VA healthcare system access to data in support of new and emerging requirements
- Connects over 130 instances of VistA (EHR), 172 VA medical centers, 1074 outpatient clinics, 300K global facilities, 320K healthcare professionals, and over 14M Veterans
- Processes 1.4B transactions/month
- Supports 700k users
- Is hosted in the VA Enterprise Cloud (in the AWS GovCloud)
VDIF Results
Reducing wait time by 75% for care referrals outside VA: CCRA
Led by federal solution integrator Cognosante, Community Care Referral and Authorization (CCRA) is an enterprise-wide program used to generate timely referrals and authorizations for Veterans receiving care in their communities, outside of VA.
CCRA integrated with InterSystems technology into a broader solution and streamlined and automated what was a largely manual and slow process. It has reduced Veterans’ wait times for a referral from over a month to just under a week.
Since 2020, 3.5M Veterans have been able to access care outside the VA.
CCRA Results
The Core EHR: VistA
VistA, built on InterSystems IRIS for Health, is VA’s legacy hospital information system providing clinical, financial and logistics capabilities. VA operates 130 different instances of VistA, each modified to address the needs of specific populations of Veterans.
VistA supports:
- 9M Veterans
- 1.8M clinical encounters
- 1,074 outpatient clinics
- Many apps, including VistA imaging, BCMA, and more
- >1.8M clinical encounters per day
- 320K clinical users/daily
- 1.2M total provisioned users
VistA supports:
Recognized for innovation and impact on care
VA has received industry accolades for VDIF and CCRA. In June 2022, VDIF was awarded the 2022 FedHealthIT Innovation Award for its impact on improving Veteran care. The CCRA program was awarded the 2021 FedHealthIT Innovation Award and was the winner of the 2021 Government Program/Project of the Year presented by the Washington Exec Pinnacle Awards.
The InterSystems Difference
