Abstract
Background/Aims The Virtual Data Warehouse (VDW) was created as a mechanism for producing comparable data across sites for purposes of proposing and conducting research. It is “virtual” in the sense that the data remain at the local sites; there is no multi-site physical database at a centralized data coordinating center. Local site programmers have mapped the data elements from their HMO’s data systems into a VDW standardized set of variable definitions, names, and codes, as well as onto standardized SAS file formats. This common structure of the VDW files enables a SAS analyst at one site to write one program to extract and/or analyze data at all participating sites.
Methods This poster demonstrates the wide range of data sources used at Meyers Primary Care Institute to feed information into our local implementation of the VDW datasets.
Results The Meyers Primary Care Institute works with Fallon Community Health Plan (FCHP), a not-for-profit managed care plan in central Massachusetts closely aligned with Reliant Medical Group (RMG), a multi-specialty group practice. FCHP provides enrollment, demographics, pharmacy, and data on utilization; data are available for 1999–2010. RMG provides clinical data on their patients including vital signs and laboratory test results. Electronic text from RMG’s EMR is pulled for specific studies. Tumor data are obtained from the tumor registries at our major hospitals on request; linked data have been obtained from the state tumor registry for patients who receive care from the RMG. The Meyers Primary Care Institute local implementation of the VDW contains medical details on 0.47 million FCHP enrollees. The VDW files encompass more than 22 million medical encounters, including more than 36 million diagnoses, and nearly 56 million procedures. We have more than 20 million pharmacy dispensing, nearly 1.6 million Vital Signs observations (2007–2009), and nearly 3 million lab results (1996–2009).
Conclusions The VDW provides an easily employable unified central repository of data from all available source files. This resource enables the sharing of compatible data in multi-site studies, and also improves programming efficiency, accuracy, and completeness for local single site studies by expending resources to link these legacy systems only once.
