The ICR provides several clinical and administrative reports for VAMC and headquarter's use. The ICR module retrieves several other local data files that contain information concerning diagnosis, prescriptions, surgical procedures, laboratory tests, radiology exams, dental care, patient demographic characteristics, hospital admissions, and clinical visits. This process allows identified clinical staff to take advantage of the wealth of data supported through local databases. Users need only identify the patient and determine the disease category for that patient. An extra level of security is provided by the VA to be consistent with VA laws and policies.
Essential information is encrypted.
Data extracts are automatically conducted by the VA's mainframe system. ICR was fully implemented in 1992 across all the VAMCs and contains access to complete medical records including demographic information, diagnoses, resource utilization, pharmacy and laboratory data on over 45,000 patients. The ICR provides local and national tracking of HIV positive veterans by severity of the disease. Depending upon the objectives and study designs, linkages with other databases are feasible. These linkages can be achieved through encoding of unique identifiers of ICR and other databases by developing a third code that uses a common algorithmic table.