Department of Veterans Affairs
Seasonal Disease Review

This public-facing report provides the same aggregated information that is available to VA leaders and clinicians and displays respiratory virus cases which are counted once per season, running from October through September. It leverages VA's unique national data infrastructure and informatics capabilities to create a timely, automated bio-surveillance process.

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 cases. These include:

1. Direct query of laboratory test results
2. 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.

The data represented here are updated from our automated biosurveillance system multiple times a day.

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. Our tool and our data will be updated as the medical community’s knowledge and capabilities evolve.