**Transcript of Cyberseminar**

**VIReC Corporate Data Warehouse**

**Metadata Resources for Researchers Beginning to Use CDW Data**

**Presenter: Ruth Perin, MA**

**March 28, 2013**

**Identification of Outpatient Workload in CDW (Corporate Data Warehouse)**

**March 28, 2013**

Moderator:Welcome to VIReC's first corporate data warehouse CDW cyberseminar titled CDW Meta Data Resources for Researchers beginning to use CDW data. VIReC will be hosting periodic seminars on using CDW data for research. Stay tuned. 

Thank you to CIDER for providing technical and promotional support for this series. Today's speaker is Ruth Perin, MA degree, Health Information Specialist at VIReC. Just to remind you, questions will be monitored during the talk in the Q&A portion as Heidi indicated and I will present them to Ruth at the end of her talk. A brief evaluation questionnaire will pop up when you close GoTo Webinar today. We really would appreciate if you would take a minute and complete. 

I am pleased to welcome today's speaker, Ruth Perrin. 

Ruth:Thank you, Margaret. Good morning, everyone. I am Ruth Perrin and it is great that so many of you are interested in exploring the CDW. Today we are going to talk about CDW meta data resources for researchers beginning to use CDW data. First before we start I would like to acknowledge the management of the CDW, Steve Martin, Jack Bates and Steve Anderson who are so generous with their time in answering VIReC’s many questions about the CDW. Then I want to extend sincere thanks to my colleagues at VIReC, all my colleagues at VIReC. Especially those listed here for their counsel as I prepared these slides. I see Lucy Zhang's name was left off inadvertently in error. Sorry about that, Lucy, but she was certainly a help too. I want to give a very big shout out to everyone who sends questions to the VIReC help desk. We learn so much when we are chasing down the answers for you. And we also learn a lot of wonderful stuff from the generous contributors to the HSR data lister. Thank you all. 

Of course, any errors included in this presentation are my own. Our objectives for today's session are to provide resources to help you to identify the corporate data warehouse -- that is the CDW, data elements you need and to find detailed information about those CDW data elements. So you will know where to start when looking out for - when you have a CDW data question. At the end I will also provide you with contact information for services available to give you individualized help. 

Then finally, I will try to answer any questions that occur to you during this session. 

Now, for a little about the organization of today's session; instead of just listing and describing the various meta data and information sources available to you I would like to talk today about how you would use each resource. To do that I am going to use examples like these; mostly questions that have come into VIReC help desk from real researchers using CDW data. Questions like how do I even find out what is in the CDW? This can be a challenge for researchers who don't have direct access to be able to explore the CDW. The next four questions are for people transitioning from SAS files to the CDW. They are - I have been using Med SAS data which CDW data elements should I use, is scrambled SSN data available in the CDW, the outpatient med test variable isn't in the CDW, why not? And I have been using the DSS national data extracts, the NDEs, how can I find the names of equivalent variables in the CDW DSS data? 

And then we will talk about some of the new data that wasn't available in national data sets until the CDW like do the vital signs data include pain scores? What is a health factor? Can you use health factors to determine a veteran smoking status? Where can I find a list of the surveys and tests included in the CDW's mental health data? And what is the best data element for identifying lab tests in the CDW data? 

Still, before we get started I would like to mention a couple of things that I learned while becoming familiar with the CDW and they are that, first, no one resource can answer all CDW data questions. Each resource contains a piece of the puzzle. For many of the questions we discussed I will suggest multiple resources that you can consult. Another tip, one more thing that bears mentioning is that most meta data for the CDW and, in fact, almost all of the resources that I will cover today are on the VA intranet behind the VA firewall. I have listed the links on a slide at the end for your future reference. 

Now, I would like to ask a couple of questions so I can get to know you so I can better meet your needs today. Heidi, would you please put up the first poll question? 

Heidi:The responses are coming in. 

Ruth:Okay. If you have more than one role just select one that you primarily identify with. All over the place. Well that is great. It is a great mix. Okay. Then one more question so I will be better able to address your interests. Heidi, would you please put up the second poll question? How much CDW data have you analyzed? Well, this is a session for beginners so all of you people who are just getting started this is for you. And also for you folks who have used a little. The folks who have used some hopefully you will be able to contribute some at the end when the questions come up and same for the folks who have used a lot. So thank you very, very much. 

Let's get started with the first topic. Especially chosen for the first time users in the audience which is how do I even find out what is in the CDW? In this case I recommend that you start with the VIReC website. The VIReC webpage on the CDW is a good place to start for this sort of thing. Here is VIReC's webpage where you will find basic web ground and descriptions of what the CDW is, how it is structured, what it is intended to do to give you a good foundation on which to build a more sophisticated understanding of the CDW. Click here on documentation to see data dictionaries for some CDW domains VIReC will soon be adding more material here which I will mention later in today's presentation. I should mention that I have no plans to describe the CDW in depth here. That would be an entire session all on its own. Instead, I will be pointing out some of the resources to get you started with finding out what is in the CDW. 

Another good resource for CDW background and descriptive material is the VIReC resource guide for the CDW. You will find a link to this guide on the VIReC webpage that I just showed you on the previous slide. 

VIReC resource guide goes into more detail on the webpage, describing the contents and the purpose and the utility of the CDW for research. 

As I mentioned before this session isn't intended to be an in depth description of the CDW. Before you follow this presentation you need to know that the CDW is a relational database organized into data domains. Each domain is a set of fact tables and dimension tables with a common theme. Usually the theme indicates the VistA application from which most of the data elements originates. For instance, vital signs or mental health assessment. 

Data domains are categorized as production or raw. In the VIReC resource guide to CDW you will find a description of the difference between CDW production and raw data domains. This distinction between production and raw is key for many reasons. But right now it is relevant because documentation for production and raw domains is different and it is stored in different places on the CDW internet site. We will talk about the production domain meta data first. If you don't see the domain you are interested in the production domain meta data check the CDW raw documentation which we will cover shortly. Just by the way documentation for the DSS NDEs is located with the CDW raw documentation. Another great resource for background information on the CDW is a new manual posted on the CDW SharePoint just this month. It includes all of the topics listed here and many, many more. You can look here for practical advice on best practices to use while you are exploring CDW data. Of course, much of the advice is only applicable to those who have direct access to the CDW, not researchers who must request an extract and thus are doubly dependent on good meta data. 

By the way, I stumbled across this manual on the tech team home page of the CDW, VA intranet site so I have added that as a tip on the bottom of the slide here. Now that you have a little background about what the CDW is and its general organization we will talk about how to find more specifics about what is on the CDW. We will check out the production domains first. For the production domains see the meta data report on the CDW SharePoint site on the VA intranet. Here is where you will find the nuts and bolts of what data exists. That is what are the tables in each domain and the columns or fields in each table? 

Here is a partial list of the details you will find in the fields on each table on a meta data report. They are the field names, the data type, the length, primary and foreign key indicators, VistA source file and fields, the VistA field description, the VistA field type, etc. The VistA field descriptions and other VistA details located here on the meta data report come straight from VistA's own documentation when you check out the meta data report you may notice a lot of the VistA documentation is incomplete or missing. But unfortunately, that is how it is in the source. There is not much we can do about that. 

Still on the meta data, the CDW meta data report if you click on the name of the domain you are interested in you will find it is a live link and it will take you to a model of the domain like this called an entity relationship model. The CDW meta data report model for each - each table on the model represents a table in the CDW. On this one the pink one is a dimension table. The blue one represents a FAQ table. For example, the blue vital sign table contains the actual patient measurements for the facts. The pink vital type table contains a list of vital sign types. Also known as dimensions. 

To get any of the attributes of the measurement you would join the tables together. It might also help to know that the line with the filled in diamond at the end indicates a one too many relationship. Okay, now let me just summarize for the production domains there is a meta data report which gives you the tables and columns and a graphic picture of the relationships of the tables for each domain. 

Now onto the meta data for the raw domains. For the raw domains see the CDW raw page on the CDW SharePoint site on the VA intranet. Notice that on that tech team tab here - see if I can point it out. On the tech team tab select database and then CDW raw. That will bring you to this table where you will find the list of the domains in the CDW raw. Click on the domain name which is a live link to see the specifications of the tables in each of these domains. By the way, if you would like to learn more about the difference between production and raw data you can click on this extractor guide tab available on this page and look in the manual for data warehouse customers which has a lot of information available to you there. 

The CDW DSS data are located on the CDW raw server and the CDW DSS meta data are on the CDW SharePoint's CDW raw page. The page that I just showed you on the previous slide. If you scroll to the bottom of that page you will see it and there you will find the information about CDW DSS data such as the fact that the CDW and DSS teams have consolidated many DSS SAS files into a single table for each NDE and they have standardized the names across the years. 

Here is a sample of more of the meta data for the CDW DSS data. It is a table showing what years of data are available for each NDE, for each national data extract. 

Now here is another resource available from the CDW because the CDW management knows how essential it is that you know what is in the data that you plan to analyze they created a domain that is made up of summary data. Summary statistics for each production domain. This domain holds record counts and null counts and for coded variables they run frequencies for each code all by year. According to the CDW's best practices guide they refresh the counts weekly. If you are looking for summary data then querying the tables in the data profiling domain would get you results much faster than querying the data tables directly. Unfortunately, for the time being, researchers don't have access to this useful resource. We will need to request account. Perhaps you can submit a preparatory to research request to DART and by the way sometimes the only way to see the full range of contents of the data is through running a query on the data. This is true, for instance if you are interested in a character variable or if you need counts with the dimensions attached for instance if you need counts for vital signs or for immunizations. For this you currently need to submit a preparatory to research directly to DART. 

However, coming soon from VIReC because summary information and a general idea of a table's contents is so important to researchers we at VIReC decided we want to make it as readily available as possible. We are currently in the process of formatting for the VIReC site the same summary data presented in the CDW data profiling domain. That is the record counts, null counts and discreet variable frequencies. One caution, our data won't be updated weekly like the CDW is. We are thinking of updating every six months. Nevertheless it should provide useful information especially for preparatory to research work. And by the way, sometimes the only way to see the contents of the data is still to run the query on the data. For that you will still need to submit a preparatory research request to DART. 

Then to give you a better idea of what are the CDW contents; we will post on the VIReC website 20 randomly selected rows that is observations from each table. We are also in the process of preparing this for the VIReC website. It is entirely de-identified including having no dates at all in it, but it will give you an idea of the kind of information in the text fields. One caution again we are thinking of updating it every six months. I still think it will provide useful information especially for preparatory research work. And by the way sometimes the 20 random cases aren't enough. You still need to request counts through DART. 

Margaret:This is Margaret. I thought I would say to the audience that there are a lot of concerns about getting the websites, the intranet websites you are talking about and we will certainly make them available to people who are in the VA firewall and not to worry we will talk about it at the end of the talk how you can get them all. I just wanted to say that Ruth because people are trying to find them now and so forth. 

Ruth:Yes, sure. Yes, they are listed at the end of the slides and I believe it is up to CIDER if they make them available widely or just to people who have VA addresses I am not sure. I have listed all of these sites. 

That is it for the basics of finding what is at the CDW. On to the next topic, topic two. It is an example of how you would use meta data resource in the course of an actual inquiry. It is a common dilemma for first time CDW users. I have been using a med test data for diagnosis codes or procedure codes or clinic stops or whatever. Which CDW data element should I use. 

In this case I recommend you look first at the SAS to CDW, outpatient data crosswalk on the CDW SharePoint site. It was created  by the National Data System and let's see here there you can enter a SAS variable name in the text box provided, select SAS and the crosswalk displays the CDW field name in the T SQL column. The SAS crosswalk currently covers the MedSAS outpatient files. Here is a screenshot of that crosswalk. For example, if you have been using the MedSAS variable DX LSF as one of your diagnosis measures enter DX LSF in the box and click on SAS to find the equivalent variable in the CDW. For DX LSF it is ICD IEN on the B diagnosis table. The crosswalk also displays the VistA source and field for the CDW data element. 

Now if you want to get more details like the field type and field length and confirm the definition for the CDW's ICD IEN you can check the CDW meta data report. Here you get the primary key information for a key field description and more. 

Here is what you find on the CDW meta data report for ICD IEN in the outpatient data domain. You get the table name and field name where it is located. The field data type, field length, the VistA file and VistA fields, etc. 

Please note that the VistA field description here comes right from the Vista's own documentation. 

Now for topic three. It is another frequent question for first time CDW users is scrambled SSN available in the CDW? Yes, it is. And you can use the CDW excuse me the SAS to CDW outpatient data to crosswalk we just talked about. You would enter SCR SSN in this text box here and then you click SAS and you would find that SCR SSN is located on the CDW's S patient table. 

By the way SCR SSN, scrambled SSN in the CDW is created using the same algorithm that NDS used to create SSNs in the MedSAS files. So if you need to match CDW data to other VA data identified by scrambled SSN's you will have no problem. 

On to topic four where we are still talking about the MedSAS users out there. Another frequent question from a first time CDW users the outpatient MedSAS variable I am looking for isn't in the CDW. Why not? So what if you check that SAS to CDW crosswalk and find that the CDW table and columns are blank? It could be because the MedSAS includes some derived data that are variables that are calculated based on the VistA data such as N codes which is the number of CPT codes in a segment or NCPTTOT the total number of CPT codes in a counter. Or the period of service recode. These variables are created after the data have been extracted from VistA. Since CDW comes directly from this it doesn't include most of these derived variables. If the CDW table and column are blank on the crosswalk check to see if the VIReC research user guide's one page variable description where your target variable says derived. Look on the VIReC website for the VIReC user guides for the outpatient data or whichever file you are looking for and look in the one page variable descriptions for example here is what you would find for NCP TOT  that in fact the VistA data source is derived. You wouldn't find it in the CDW necessarily. It wouldn't be there. 

Now, in topic five we will talk about another example of how you would use a meta data resource in the  course of an actual research inquiry. It is another common dilemma for first tie data users. I have been using the DSS national Data Extracts the NDEs how can I find the names of equivalent variables in the CDW DSS data? The decision support office can help you here. Visit their VA intranet decision support system website where you will find the DSS NDE lay out specifications listed. The link will be at the end but this is a live link on the DSS site. In that file there is a work sheet for each NDE showing the SAS and SQL variable names. This is the work sheet for the account level budgeter file. You find the SAS names here and read across and you will find the SQL variable names which are the names in the CDW DSS data. I hope it is not too hard to read off of there. 

Now we will be leaving our consideration of transitioning from SAS data sets to talk about some of the new national data sets never before available. We at VIReC hear investigators say I am interested in using vitals or health factors or notes or the new lab data. For topic six we will talk about this question. Do the vital signs data include pain scores? We at the VIReC help desk have gotten this several times. Now if you are searching for a list of vital signs that CDW has data for you will probably check the CDW's data documentation first. But the CDW meta data report doesn't include the list of vital signs. If you have direct access to the CDW you could look at the contents of the vital type dimension table to see what types of vital signs are included. Or if not you could check the VINCI central site on the VA intranet. VINCI central is the VA intranet website where the VINCI group posts useful information and CDW meta data. VINCI central has a list of vital signs on the data tab on their websites. Select data available and then data signs and here is some of what you will see. 

VINCI Central documentation for the vital signs includes a list of the fields plus other information like the years for which the data are available, record counts shown here on the right which need to be carefully considered when you place your data request. Remember that every vital measurement taken in the VA every hour, every day is included in the CDW so these files can be huge. The fact that the CDW includes no data on modifiers like which arm was used whether the patient was standing or lying down when the measurement was taken, etc. that is information that is included also in the VINCI central meta data for the vital signs. 

It would also be a good idea to become familiar with the documentation that is available from the CDW on the meta data report for the vital signs data. They would find additional essential meta data such as the parameters. Such as the dates and locations that are available to go with the vital sign reading and the entered in error flag, which is unique to the vital signs data. 

Remember now that vital signs data are a relatively newly available for analysis. Since source VistA files includes errors that are not filtered out by the CDW thoroughly exploring the data is key. The NOEL article cited here includes some recommendations for types of tests you will want to run and anomalies you want to watch out for and it describes the importance of becoming familiar with how the data are originally collected. If used with caution the vital signs data now available from the CDW can be expected to produce valid results. As with any new data source more exact information on the quality of the data will only become available by increased use by researchers. 

Health factors are another new type of data thanks to the CDW they are now available on a national scale. What is a health factor? A health factor is a data element in VistA that captions miscellaneous patient information that is not otherwise captured elsewhere, such as family history of alcohol abuse, lifetime non-smoker, no risks to hepatitis C, etc. Health factors can be created locally and are not standard across the VA. Both of those things are very important to remember when you try to analyze home site data. 

A list of the current health factors is available on the data architecture repository, the DARs site. If you would like to see the current health factors visit the data architecture repository site on the VA intranet. Select standard table data and then let's see and then let's select health factors from a pick list of standard tables. First you would go to the DAR select Vista meta data repository from the fly out menu on the left. Then a standard table data tab and then in this drop down box you would select health factors. When you do that you will get all the lists of the names of all of the factors - this is an extractable file. You can download it as an excel file. Still on the subject of health factors another frequent question of help desk has to do with smoking status, a health factor so important to health. This issue is somewhat complex. This issue of can you use health factors to determine a patient's smoking status. There are actually several dozen health factors that pertain to smoking cessation and you will find them in the standard table data on the DAR. However, because health factors are locally designed they vary in what information they say. A standard set of questions was developed to help facilities comply with the tobacco screening performance measures. And while facilities adopted them facilities were not mandated to adopt them. And each facility had the option to customize the questions and customize how the answers are recorded. 

Other data on smoking exists. There are the CPT codes that might be applied to a patient who uses tobacco products or to a patient with a past history of tobacco products regardless of when they quit smoking. There are tobacco codes for tobacco use cessation. There are CPT codes for tobacco cessation for intervention and counseling and for pharmacological therapy. None of these are mandatory and while smoking cessation treatment happens frequently I don't think the codes are used very often. The pharmacy data indicates prescriptions for nicotine or nicotine agonist that is another clue that can be used when studying smoking status. 

I recommend looking at previous studies of smoking among veterans to find out how earlier investigators measured current smoking or a history of smoking. From what I have seen earlier adopters of CDW's health factors data have found it a rich source of information sometimes complex and hard to organize. I particularly recommend this McGinnes study which carefully created an algorithm to convert the text in health factors data to a three point scale indicating never, former or current smoker and they compared the results to self report smoking data from study participants. They found a substantial agreement in the data from both sources. 

On to the next topic. Now in another new data domain the mental health data. The question is where can I find a list of the surveys and tests included in CDDW's mental health data? We often get asked which tests and surveys are included. I haven't found a list of the surveys included though. We would need to ask someone with operational access to the CDW to look at the content of the Dim.survey table. We do know that the surveys in the mental health assistant package get rolled into the CDW mental health tables except tests with text or code sets that are copy righted. 

Since there is no list I asked a VIReC programmer to get me an inventory of what is in the Dim.survey .survey name column and from that I made this list of some of the most common surveys captured in the mental health tables. Note that this list is not exhaustive but it does include common tests such as the PHQ9 audit C NMPI and SF36. Many of you in the audience know better than I what the acronyms stand for. In any case the important point here is that as with all new data it is important to get to know how the data are gathered and stored. For example, researchers who have used CDW Audit C data found it challenging to organize and interpret, but useful, previous VIReC cyber seminaries have detailed their experience. Other mental health data that has not yet been heavily analyzed might prove to be just as challenging we don't know yet. 

Now for the final topic today the CDW lab chemistry data. It seems that a lot of researchers are trying their hands at analyzing data in the CDW's lab data domains. The question is what is the best way to identify a lab test in the CDW? This data is complex for numerous reasons. Richard Pham of the CDW has done a lot of work with the lab data and I recommend that you review his work available on the CDW SharePoint. It includes the pros and cons of using a lab test name the National VA Code IEN and LOINC codes as identifiers in your work. I recommend it and I provided a tip here on how to find it on the CDW SharePoint because I didn't find it very easily myself. Again on the CDW SharePoint site you will get a list at the end at the link excuse me, at the end. You will select training and then under training links select CDW data - data sets and basic SQL. 

Okay these are the resources that we talked about earlier today. These are the links that will get you to the CDW SharePoint site and I have given you tips on the previous slides for the particular spaces that we covered. The VIReC site where you will find the CDW page and the CDW guide and documentation such as data dictionaries and VINCI Central which is VINCI's website providing their documentation of the CDW. The data architecture repository where there is standard table data, the list of health factors and vital signs and that sort of thing. The decision support office which provides the documentation for DSS data. 

Now onto the resources we have highlighted today and - for contacts. Individualized support. Here are some resources for you beginning with VINCI and the Austin Help Desk. Both of those I would say are really best with technical support and your connections with the CDW. The Austin Help Desk provides 24 hour service and also the email is very good for questions with regard to anomalies that you find in the CDW data. I would highly recommend the CDCONSDA@va.gov email address. There are people from the data quality group who will address your questions if you send them there if you find anomalies in the CDW data. 

And, of course, the VIReC resource center is a good resource for VA researchers with questions about CDW data. We are always happy to help. Please contact us through any of the methods listed here. And VIReC hosts this virtual community called HSR Data List Serve of VA researchers who share knowledge and experiences about VA data and information systems. Any of you out there who are already members of that list serve know what a valuable resource it is. If you are not a member and you have a va.gov email address please visit the VIReC website to learn how to enroll. I think you will find it very helpful. That is all I have for today unless there are some questions out there. 

Margaret:Well, Ruth, thank you very much. You have covered a lot. I am sure everybody will want to download the slides if they have not done so already so that they can go back and try to absorb all of this. The slides will be up on the CIDER Cyber Seminar website internet within 24 - 48 hours. There were some questions about can I get the slides. There are also, as I mentioned to you, Ruth, quite a few questions about where is this website, what is that website. Obviously, when you download the slides you will have the websites listed on the slides. I also think that VIReC should maybe send out an advance a list with all of the - indicating all of the pages that Ruth referred to in giving you the URL. These are all VA intranet, we can only send VA intranet addresses to people with a VA email. If you are listening to this talk today and you do not have a VA email you cannot get these addresses from us. 

So, Ruth, that was my little preamble. There are lots of questions here. There are so many about so where are the pages? Okay. Irma McCaffrey from National Data Systems included two comments which is... DART is not presently set up for preparatory to research requests. And therefore those preparatory to research requests will still go through the NDS research access requests. I am sure if you go to the NDS intranet website you can find out about that. We might include that link too. 

Okay Ruth, here is first real question; what is the frequency of data collection for vital signs? Once per hour, per day?

Ruth:Well, let's see here. It is per day. It is refreshed nightly. So all of this data - all of the measurements that are taken on a particular day all over the VA are loaded up nightly into the CDW. 

Margaret:Okay. This question kind of touches on that but has more to it. I am currently exploring CDW and the medical SAS files on the main frame. How often is CDW updated? Well, you just answered that. But here - 

Ruth:It depends. It depends on what data you are talking about. If you are talking about a production domain then by and large they are updated nightly. If you are talking about a raw domain then the schedule for updating or refreshing the raw domains is irregular. It depends on the domain but you can find it on the CDW SharePoint site on the CDW raw page. 

Margaret:Okay. Here is the rest of this question for you to address; rerunning my queries on CDW often pulls additional records whereas my medical SAS runs are consistent as long as I don't change my code. Can you comment on that? 

Ruth:The CDW is not a stable file like the MedSAS was. The MedSAS files were created and they don't change. The CDW changes constantly. It is like a river that is flowing as data keeps being added to it. That is going to always be true. If you run data against the CDW the answer that you get is going to be changing constantly. 

Margaret:For the health factor data how far back does this data go? 1999? 2008? 

Ruth:You know, I would have to check on that just to be sure. I would suspect that it will vary depending on the health factor, but I would rather check on that. That is a really good question. I don't know that it is in the documentation, but I will find out. 

Margaret:Next question part of it is will the audio for today's presentation be available later? I believe totally yes. It usually is. The other part of the question is is there a time line available for expected implementation of CDW's structures, documentation, etc. not currently available? 

Ruth:There is some information available though it is - it changes for one thing. I am not sure that I am a little hesitant to suggest that I think that it will be possible for us to send out - we can send out to the group listening today the plans for the CDW they are plans for imminent work that is going to become available. And that is about- it doesn't cover everything but we could certainly send out something from the CDW governance board with regard to their plans for the near future. 

Margaret:Okay. Here is another question; on the VINCI website it says that complete copies of the SAS data sets extracted from the NPCD and maintained by AIPC have been acquired by VINCI. Is it possible to use these rather than the CDW...  it says MedSAS, anyways, the CDW tables for research purposes so that derived variables are included? 

Ruth:Certainly. Absolutely. If you want to use the MedSAS files available through VINCI, yes. With regard to that with the understanding that there will not be any outpatient MedSAS files soon for the coming years, but yes. Absolutely use them. 

Margaret:Okay. Here is a question; where do we find Richard Pham's course? I think we will put that exact URL if there is a direct URL we will put that in the list we send out. 

Ruth:Well, tab by tab and sections on the slide and we will certainly provide the link. 

Margaret:Okay. Here is a comment Ruth and it is for everybody of course and for VIReC. I would love to see very focused hands-on training via web or other means available later. We certainly need to think about that. Please understand that this is a huge change for many of us who have used the MedSAS datasets for years and who are not familiar with either Vista names or with SQL. The more training opportunities and very clear documentation available the better. Thank you. I don't know if you want to comment on that, Ruth. 

Ruth:Yes. Certainly, the slides are going to be available for you to refer to as you can go page by page. I thought to do it this way because this way you will have the slides with the tips as to where to go as opposed to just doing this live. If I do it live then the page disappears and you don't remember where we were when this session is over. This way you have a record so you can follow through with each resource that we - that I introduce. I hope that you will become very familiar with them. 

Margaret:Okay. This question: What if I had requested data from the clinical case registry before? Now that entity is resolved. Should I contact DART or NDS to request updated data? It is a little hard to answer. I am not sure what the clinical case registry being referred to is. 

Ruth:I think that is something it sounds like an individual case as well so that is something we will need to get back to the requester after we get a little more information. 

Margaret:Okay. And here is a comment; please also mention, Ruth, that VIReC is working with VINCI and NDS to create a unified web portal for information about VA data with links to the other sites as well. 

Ruth:I think you pretty much covered that. Thank you. 

Margaret:Okay. Stay tuned. We will certainly be informing everybody through VIReC dissemination means about the upcoming new portal as it is being unfolded and being developed. 

Okay. We are on the slides. Okay. We also - here is another comment and I do want to let you know we are planning more session on VIReC on using CDW data. We have indicated to researchers previously that there is training offered from CDW we can put some information about that in this little cheat sheet we are going to send out to you about where to look for training offers from CDW. But the training VIReC is planning and it isn't in the planning stage and will be announcing some new seminars soon will be geared towards researchers and especially as one comment was made researchers who are used to MedSAS data, DSS from the mainframe SAS coding and not SQL and we will be gearing things toward that. 

Here is another comment; can you revisit the distinction between production and raw meta data? 

Margaret:Sure. Production data is data that has been modeled that is to say I'm not an experienced SQL programmer, but it means the tables have been built and indexed so that if they facilitate quick querying, facilitates efficient processing of data it doesn't include every data element that is in the source. It includes those data elements that were deemed important by a group of subject matter experts. So there has been a model created that includes the important data variables and it has been organized to improve efficiency. The raw domains however are by and large direct access from the source system, which in most cases is Vista, it reflects the same organization that whatever organization it had in Vista or its other source domain. It is not as efficient to work with. In a lot of cases the raw domains are domains of data that are in the process of becoming production domains. 

In other cases the data - there is no plan to make it ever a production domain. For instance, with the notes I don't believe that will ever become a production domain. I believe it will always stay in raw category. I hope that covers the difference between production and raw. It is a part of it and there certainly is more to it if you wanted to look further in the resource guide, the VIReC resource guide and also the CDW manual that I referenced. 

Margaret:Okay. There is one more comment here somebody typed in a response for the question about the CCR data. So I'm not going to go through that here so we will get that answer to the person who asked that question. 

Ruth:Thank you whoever did that. Thank you so much. 

Margaret:We are close to the top of the hour. We want to let you all know that we are at VIReC planning more seminars. We don't have an exact date yet so I'm not going to announce anything. As soon as we do we know that people are very anxious to learn more about it. We will disseminate information about our next seminar in our occasional series. VIReC will disseminate that information. Sider will as well. Please, please, please respond to the evaluation when you sign out today. When you log off of GoTo Webinar and take the opportunity now to say specifically what you would like to hear about CDW from VIReC for researchers. This is a great opportunity. The final thing you can do is to always email your questions, suggestions, etc. to the VIReC help desk. That is VIReC@va.gov. 

So thank you Ruth, so much. Thank you all and have a good day. 

Ruth:Thank you all. Bye-bye. 

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