Health Services Research & Development

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HSR&D Resource Centers and Centralized Service Program

HSR&D; provides core funding to four Resource Centers and a Centralized Service Program that support HSR&D; management and the COINs by providing data, consultation, and focused research on management issues, health economics and system.

See also

What can the HSR&D; Resource Centers do for you? (Cyberseminar)

Resource Centers

Centralized Service Program

Health Economics Resource Center (HERC), Menlo Park, CA

HERC logo Center Focus:
  • Document and evaluate of VA economic data bases, including Managerial Cost Accounting (MCA) system national data extracts, and data on purchased care, pharmacy, prosthetics and other cost data.
  • Create new VA economics data, including a comprehensive estimate of the cost of all VA health care encounters, annual patient-level cost estimates, an index of the relative labor cost of different facilities, a schedule of the cost of employing different types of health care staff, and a discharge-level database of inpatient costs derived from the MCA inpatient data.
  • Provide Cybercourses on cost-effectiveness analysis and econometric methods.
  • Coordinate Cyberseminars on health economic methods and findings
  • Assist VA researchers with a health economics consulting service
  • Convene working groups of HSR&D; researchers to address economic issues of special concern to the Veterans Health Administration.

Center Executive Summary

Contact
Todd Wagner, PhD
(650) 617-2630
email: herc@va.gov
web site: http://www.herc.research.va.gov

VA Information Resource Center (VIREC), Hines, IL

VIREC logo

Mission: 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.

Center Focus:

  • Advance data knowledge and methods by conducting research and collaborating with experts in the field to create a knowledge base of factual and evaluative information about VA data and information systems.
  • Disseminate data knowledge and information that enables researchers to maximize the power of VA data and information systems.
  • Facilitate knowledge sharing among the data user community.
  • Collaborate with VA data stewards and program offices to enhance data availability and to address issues affecting research that uses data and information systems.

VIReC Factsheet

Contact
Maria Souden, MSI, PhD
(708) 202-2476
email: Maria.Souden@va.gov
web site: http://www.virec.research.va.gov/

Center for Information Dissemination and Education Resources, Boston, MA

CIDER logo

Center Focus

  • Developing publications and managing HSR&D; national dissemination efforts;
  • Managing the national HSR&D; and QUERI websites;
  • Planning and facilitating meetings and conferences, including HSR&D; and QUERI national meetings and state-of-the-art conferences;
  • Coordinating HSR&D; cyber seminars; and
  • Developing HSR&D; contributions to R&D; publications and other VA and non-VA publications and products.

Center Executive Summary

Contact
Gerald F. O'Keefe, JD, MPH
(857) 364-6073
email: Cider.Boston@va.gov
web site: http://www.cider.research.va.gov/

VA Informatics and Computing Infrastructure (VINCI), Salt Lake City, UT

VINCI logo

Center Focus

  • Build a secure, high-performance computing environment for researchers to access data
  • Construct integrated databases from national clinical and administrative data sets
  • Consolidate processes and procedures for access to data ensuring compliance with VA policies
  • Provide tools to analyze data, report results, and support informatics research
  • Reach out to the research community

Director
Scott L. DuVall, PhD

Contact VINCI:
For personalized, one-on-one support during business hours of 8:30AM to 4:30PM Mountain Time
Email: VINCI@VA.GOV
Phone: 1-801-872-3324

After hours and weekends, contact the National Service Desk in Austin.
Email: nsd-aus@va.gov
Phone: 1-888-326-6780

web site: http://vaww.vinci.med.va.gov/vincicentral/default.aspx
(This site is hosted on the VA intranet. If you have intranet access, copy and paste the URL into your browser.)
Additional information about VINCI is available at http://www.hsrd.research.va.gov/for_researchers/vinci/default.cfm.

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Centralized Transcription Service Program (CTSP), Salt Lake City, UT

Program Focus

  • Supply timely and high quality transcripts completed by VA staff trained in qualitative research
  • Provide qualitative methods expertise in the context of transcription services that may be needed for research proposals and quality improvement projects
  • Provide an infrastructure to support investigators and VA operations partners who need transcription services for qualitative research
  • Ensure VA privacy and security requirements are met by operating the Centralized Transcription Services Program within the VA firewall
  • Offer transcription services using VA funds, thereby avoiding complex and time-consuming contracting

Transcription requests: http://vaww.hsrd.research.va.gov/for_researchers/ctsp/transcript-request.cfm
(This site is hosted on the VA intranet. If you have intranet access, copy and paste the URL into your browser.)

Contact
Susan Zickmund, PhD
(801) 582-1565 x5114
email: Susan.Zickmund@va.gov

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