With support from InterSystems, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) received early access to the COVID-19 vaccine, while treating nearly 130,000 COVID-19 cases in veterans, employees, and other members of the VA community, reported the company.
Since COVID-19 arrived in the United States in early 2020, the VA has been diligently working to protect one of the nation’s most vulnerable populations: veterans. In Q2 2020, the VA launched InterSystems VDIF EP (Veterans Data Integration and Federation Enterprise Platform) based on InterSystems HealthShare to develop longitudinal patient records, which are now available to providers within the Veterans Health Administration (VHA).
The InterSystems VDIF EP solution was instrumental in enabling the VA to quickly and accurately identify veterans and clinicians within the VA’s health delivery network who contracted the virus. InterSystems VDIF EP aggregated and normalized thousands of patient records in the VA’s existing electronic medical record (EMR) systems to file a required Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that demonstrated the critical need for the VA to be included in the first wave of the vaccine distribution.
In addition to the work InterSystems and the VA accomplished in regards to vaccine distribution, the VA also leveraged InterSystems technology throughout the pandemic to assist in the deployment of resources based on the location of spikes in positive COVID-19 cases, increases in requests for tests, availability of personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, negative pressure rooms and rooms that could easily be made negative pressure rooms, as well as current locations and availability of compassionate care physicians.
Based on InterSystems HealthShare, VDIF aggregates and normalizes data from 130 different electronic medical record (EMR) instances supporting 172 VA medical centers and 1,074 outpatient clinics. The VDIF project was led by the VA Office of Information Technology (OIT), in conjunction with the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) together with InterSystems Corporation.
