COVID-19 National Summary - VA Access to Care

Department of Veterans Affairs
COVID-19 National Summary

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the largest integrated health system in the United States with more than nine million enrolled Veterans and over six million Veterans receiving healthcare each year. VA employs nearly 380,000 individuals including more than 350,000 professionals within the Veterans Health Administration.

This report summarizes what we know about the status of COVID-19 patients who have been tested or treated at VA facilities.

* Definitions

* Frequently Asked Questions

Why did VA move to a different reporting format for its COVID-19-related case counts?

The accelerating pace of VA’s response to the national emergency required us to leverage VA’s unique national data infrastructure and informatics capabilities to create a timely, automated biosurveillance process. The public-facing report provides the same aggregated information that is available to VA leaders and clinicians, and displays all known VA COVID-19 cases that are tested or treated at a VA facility. Beginning May 4, 2020, the VA COVID-19 report incorporates deaths reported to VA from the community.

The tool also provides a display of non-VA data (community cases diagnosed and treated at non-VA healthcare facilities) provided by Johns Hopkins University, Center for Systems Science and Engineering. This is included to provide a general picture of the extent of COVID-19 illness in the community where a VA facility is located. The data cannot be used to compare VA infection or mortality rates with the community because of differences in population risk, test availability, and follow-up.

What are those unique data & informatics capabilities?

As an integrated healthcare system with a common electronic health record, VA has the ability to extract and compile information in near-real-time from all its facilities. A number of complementary approaches are then applied to this information to identify and validate COVID-19 cases. These include:

Direct query of laboratory test results
Examination of administrative data such as assignment to a dedicated COVID-19 bed
Interrogation of clinician text notes using artificial intelligence approaches such as machine learning, and natural language processing to capture insights that would be missed using only structured administrative or lab data.

These approaches are subject to ongoing human review by clinical experts in infectious disease, public health, and critical care to validate and refine our approach.

How often is the reporting tool updated?: The data represented here are updated from our automated biosurveillance system approximately every hour.

How accurate is the reporting?: Our tool reflects the most accurate and timely information that VA can assemble at this time. Ongoing human review is used to verify results and refine our automated approaches. However, we know from past experience that the true extent and impact of an epidemic only emerges over time, and is particularly dependent on having widely available and accurate testing throughout the community. Our tool and our data will be updated as the medical community’s knowledge and capabilities for COVID-19 evolve.

* Note about Mann-Grandstaff Medical Center in Spokane, WA