Motivation

Disparate data can lead to ineffective patient care, increased costs, increased burdens on VA Medical Centers (VAMC), and an inability to capture a patient’s complete medical status.  As VA continues to strive to become a high reliability organization (HRO), VA will need to ensure that its data captured is actionable, shareable and translatable.

Health Factors are discrete data elements captured in VistA/CPRS through user-friendly data entry templates.  While new VistA enhancements allow Health Factors to be linked to codes from standardized health vocabularies such as SNOMED CT, they often cannot be translated to other systems or shared easily.  Converting Health Factors into a commonly accepted format would enable health data to be shared more easily with other systems and other facilities outside of VA.