Data-Driven Decision-Making: A Model Decision Support Analytic Tool

Central to the establishment of effective measures of access and quality for rural veterans and to the optimal management of resources by the VA's Office of Rural Health (ORH) is the development of a robust decision support system. This decision support system leverages existing and new streams of data to raise situational awareness of aggregate trends, to develop prompt and accurate responses to both political leaders and policy planners, to generate flexible analytic strategies to meet challenging policy questions, and to provide effective evaluations and assessments of the impacts of policies, initiatives, and services promoted by the ORH. It includes interactive graphical representations, geocoded overlays, and analytic maps; provides aggregate measures, tracks local variability, and allows local drill-down capability; tracks both clinic metrics and program management measures and allows specific directed analyses; and provides a basic medical surveillance capability. This session describes the conceptual framework for the ORH decision support system, reports on progress on development of the beta testing version, and highlights its role in ORH's data-driven decision-making approach.