Data Sharing Work Group
Challenges and opportunities related to sharing data arise when working across a collaboratory of pragmatic clinical trials. The Data Sharing Work Group aims to promote informatic solutions through development of comprehensive and integrated database resources that incorporate extracted EHR data complemented by patient-reported data from individual pragmatic trials. Shaping data standards and establishing best practices across multiple trials and organizations will allow for effective data sharing for cross-cutting purposes, including meta-analyses to address a range of interesting and important questions related to patient phenotyping and even comparative effectiveness.
Chair or Co-Chairs:
Joseph Erdos, MD, PhD
Michael Raffanello
Project Manager:
Norman Silliker
Work Group Goals
- provide a forum for discussion of informatics challenges and solutions across projects
- harmonize data sharing standards and templates
- developing best practices and guidelines for data sharing
Work Group Co-Chairs – Qualifications and Experience
Joseph Erdos, MD, PhD, was the VACHS Chief Information Officer from 1995 to 2011 and was a member of the VA Chief Information Officers Council. He was instrumental in the early design and implementation of the VistA EHR system into care in 1999 as well as VistA Imaging. A demonstration project on Telemedicine at VA Connecticut led to the development of home telemedicine in the VA. In 2011 Dr. Erdos was tasked with development of the VA’s Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW), a repository of standardized mapped, accessible, EHR data for operations and research. He was promoted to serve as Director of the VA East Coast Business Intelligence Service Line of the Office of Information. He and his co-directors have overseen the conception and implementation of the VA CDW which has extracted and modeled over 50 clinical and administrative domains from approximately 150 VistA platforms resulting in approximately 2 trillion rows of data!
Michael Raffanello is a proven military leader and Information Technology (IT) manager with over 38 years of experience in IT project management, data management, information assurance, system security and compliance. He is in step with cutting-edge technologies and is a highly skilled communicator who builds cohesion and project engagement across all levels of staff, management, vendors, and customers. He has experience with DoD IT security and information systems as well as commercial experience and most recently VA experience. Currently, he supports the National Enterprise Service Line, Service Support Department, National VA My HealtheVet program (the VA’s personal health record for veterans), and is the lead Project Manager of the national VA Personal Identity Verification (PIV) program. He has worked with Dr. Erdos for over 5 years, with VA EHR data security, privacy and software solutions for the East Coast, and led information security strategies, security architecture, data management and coordination of security efforts related to patient, provider, employee and other confidential and sensitive information.
