Noteboom The Law Firm

VA Using Biosurveillance to Discover Disease Outbreaks

November 9, 2010 - The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is charged with one main task: protecting the health and overall wellbeing of America's veterans. That is a very broad umbrella and in order to accomplish those goals, the VA must undertake many different tasks. Standard fare is providing health care services, employment help, mental health services, and beds for the sick and homeless. Non-standard fare is using biosurveillance systems to keep tabs on global health threats.

It would seem that tracking diseases would be a function of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which it is. The vast disbursement of veterans across the nation allows the VA to use the veterans' information to establish a national picture of health. The VA's information is critical because many veterans live in potentially dangerous areas as far as the potential for pandemics exists.

The VA supplies the CDC with information on a daily basis, which is collected via the VA's version of the Electronic Surveillance System for Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE), originally designed for the Department of Defense (DoD). This system collects information from the VA's VistA (electronic health care records) system, which covers over 150 VA health care centers, and runs that information through its software in order to detect outbreaks of diseases. The VA is combining their system with the DoD's system.

At the same time, the VA is building the Healthcare-Associated Infection and Influenza Surveillance System (HAISS) to make hospital care more effective as well as giving them the ability to recognize microbes that have become resistant to drugs. The two systems give the VA a very good standpoint from which to monitor outbreaks of various diseases, which will ultimately help them to protect our veterans and non-veterans alike.