VA takes initial steps to create a centralized database of veteran research info, official says

The Department of Veterans Affairs is taking the initial steps to streamline veteran enrollment data from its clinical trials, a VA official said on Wednesday. 

Speaking at an ACT-IAC event, Liza Catucci — VA’s acting director of health systems research — said lawmakers have repeatedly asked the department to report additional data on its clinical trials but “one of the challenges that we have has to do with data siloing and interoperability issues with our data, where we have a lot of different databases in VA [and] all our program partners have their own database.”

VA’s research and clinical trials have led to numerous breakthroughs over the years, including the development of the first nicotine patch and the first liver transplant. Recently, a team led by a VA researcher identified a potential link between a strain of gut bacteria and the development of Parkinson’s disease.

The department's research data can exist in multiple repositories, such as the Integrated Veteran Epidemiologic Study Data Resource, or INVESTD-R. But Catucci said one issue is that “none of these systems communicate,” adding that "it's very difficult to gain access to that information.”

“Even within our own program, we don't have one consistently reliable database where we can capture information and all the veterans that are enrolled in our studies, and that's become a real problem,” she said.

In response to congressional outreach to remediate the problem, Catucci said VA has “constituted an internal work group of multidisciplinary people who are going to be looking at developing a singular database where we can capture veteran enrollment data in real time and building a dashboard so that we will be able to report.”

The National Association of Veterans' Research and Education Foundations, or NAVREF, told Nextgov/FCW it supports efforts to enhance data coordination and transparency of clinical trial enrollment and performance tracking information.

“VA’s research enterprise is very large and complex, with multiple data systems across program offices and external partners, so efforts to improve interoperability and real-time visibility are consistent with broader modernization conversations we’ve seen in the past,” NAVREF Public Affairs Liaison Liz Stout said in an email. “However, VA data infrastructure is only one piece of the broader opportunity for the clinical research landscape.”

Stout cited challenges “around regulatory review timelines, workforce capacity, onboarding, and operational coordination [that] also significantly affect how research is connected with veterans.”

In the early months of the second Trump administration, VA laid off probationary employees across the department but moved to provide term-limited researchers a temporary extension of their appointments. 

“In the last year, we lost a fair number of staff, including investigators in the field who are on temporary term appointments who were inadvertently let go,” Catucci said. “That created a lot of problems for us, one of which was having to temporarily pause some of our clinical trials.”