ERRT: Maria Souden

The guest speaker at this meeting of the eResearch Roundtable will be Maria Souden, associate director for communication at the Veterans Affairs Information Resource Center (VIReC). She will lead a session on "Challenges and Opportunities in Curating Large Administrative and Clinical Datasets for Research Use."

Abstract: The Veterans Health Administration is America’s largest integrated healthcare system with over 1,700 sites of care, serving 8.76 million Veterans each year. The Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) system provides data from clinical care and healthcare operations that can be used to improve the systems, processes, and outcomes of care delivery. VA’s largest data source, the Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW), holds over 1.5 petabytes of data from 23 million patients, including 2 billion outpatient encounter records, 957 million outpatient prescription records, and 14.5 million inpatient stay records. Veteran data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid comprises another 3 terabytes.

The large amounts of clinical, administrative, and financial data made available through the CDW and other national VA datasets can inform a new understanding of health outcomes, patterns, and impacts. These data simultaneously represent tremendous opportunities and significant challenges for health services researchers. The VA Information Resource Center (VIReC) mission is to advance VA capacity to use data effectively for research and quality improvement and to foster communication between research data users and the VA healthcare community. VIReC produces knowledge about VA data and how to use it, informs and educates researchers through dissemination of that knowledge, and collaborates with data stewards to address issues affecting research use of data. This talk will provide an overview of VIReC’s efforts to enhance researchers’ understanding and use of VA data, highlighting the complexities and opportunities inherent in addressing this mission within the realities of a distributed and diverse organization.

Maria Souden is associate director for communication at VIReC, where she oversees the Center’s communication, dissemination, education, and evaluation efforts. She holds a master's and a PhD from the University of Michigan School of Information. Her current research focuses on information behavior, usability, and knowledge sharing in online communities and distributed information environments.