Veterans engineering resource center: the DREAM project

Due to technological advances, data collected from direct healthcare delivery is growing by the day. The constantly growing data that was collected from various resources including patient visits, images, laboratory results and physician notes, though important, has no significance beyond its satisfying reporting and/or documentation requirements and potential application to specific clinical situations, mainly due to the voluminous and heterogeneous nature of the data. With this tremendous amount of data, manual extraction of information is expensive, time consuming, and subject to human error. Fortunately, information technologies have enabled the generation and collection of this data and also the efficient extraction of useful information. Currently, there is a broad spectrum of secondary uses of this clinical data including clinical and translational research, public health and policy analysis, and quality measurement and improvement. The following case study examines a pilot project undertaken by the Veterans Engineering Resource Center(VERC) to design a data mining software utility called Data Resource Engine & Analytical Model (DREAM).This software should be operable within the VA IT infrastructure and will allow providers to view aggregate patient data rapidly and accurately using electronic health records