VA enhances National COVID-19 Reporting Summary tool

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced today that it enhanced its National COVID-19 Report Summary website that provides a real-time look at the status of COVID-19 patients who have been tested or treated at VA facilities.

“The accelerating pace of VA’s response to the national emergency required VA to leverage the department’s unique national data infrastructure and informatics capabilities to create a timely, automated biosurveillance process,” said VA Secretary Robert Wilkie. “The public-facing report displays all known VA COVID-19 cases that are tested or treated in VA facilities.”

As an integrated health care system with a common electronic health record, VA can extract and compile information in near real-time from all its facilities. Several complementary approaches are then applied to this information to identify and validate COVID-19 cases. These approaches are subject to ongoing human review by clinical experts in infectious disease, public health and critical care to validate and refine VA’s approach.

As of today, the relaunched site divides COVID-19 case counts into the following categories:

• VA COVID-19 cumulative cases – Running total of all patients tested or treated at a VA facility for known or probable COVID-19. This includes Veterans, employees and non-Veterans.
• Active cases – Patients tested or treated at a VA facility for known or probable COVID-19 who have neither died nor reached convalescent status.
• Convalescent cases – Patients tested or treated at a VA facility for known or probable COVID-19 who are either post-hospital discharge or 14 days after their last positive test, whichever comes later.
• Known deaths – All deaths among patients tested or treated at a VA facility for known or probable COVID-19. The refence “inpatient” indicates the death occurred in a VA hospital; “known other” indicates the death was reported to VA but occurred elsewhere.

VA is grouping active and convalescent cases into the following categories: Veteran, employee, veteran-employee and all other which includes civilians admitted to VA hospitals as humanitarian cases, Tricare patients, active- duty military and other groups.

The reporting tool reflects the most accurate and timely information that VA can assemble at this time. The data represented is updated from VA’s automated biosurveillance system every hour.

For more information, visit the National COVID-19 Report Summary website.