About

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Veteran’s Hospital, Ann Arbor, Mi

The United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the most comprehensive system of assistance for Veterans of any nation in the world. Within the VA, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) provides medical, surgical, and quality-of-life needs through one of the largest health care systems in the world. All health-related data from the multiple VA regions are collected into the corporate data warehouse (CDW), now totaling over 50 terabytes. The centerpiece of the VA’s Precision Medicine Initiative, the Million Veteran Program (MVP), aims to add genotype information to the electronic health record (EHR) for one million veterans, estimated to create an additional 400 petabytes of data.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is the largest multipurpose science laboratory in the Department of Energy’s (DOE) national laboratory system. The mission of ORNL is to deliver scientific discoveries and technical breakthroughs that will accelerate the development and deployment of solutions to meet pressing global challenges aligned with the DOE’s goals. This “science-to-solutions” mission depends on the integration and application of distinctive capabilities in basic and applied research, which include leadership positions and capabilities in high-performance computing (HPC), advanced visualization and data fusion, and computational science and systems engineering and integration.

ORNL’s global leadership in computing and big data, as well as its demonstrated capability to analyze protected health information on a large scale, made it the natural destination for the analysis of the VA’s vast data stores. In fact, ORNL is the only facility housing VA data outside of the VA itself.

The intended National impact is:

• Better Healthcare via new medical discoveries in when and how to treat our Veterans to improve outcomes and reduce cost.
• Better Science via a cadre of interdisciplinary researchers and clinicians who specialize in large scale healthcare analytics.
• Better Economics via new and advanced technologies that can be deployed at any scale.
• Better Government via interagency collaborations bringing to bear the full capabilities and expertise within.

The VA-DOE Big Data Science Initiative is a partnership based within DOE’s National Laboratory system, one of the world’s top resources for supercomputing. Together, the agencies will analyze large sets of digital health and genomic data from the VA to improve the health of veterans. The initial focus is suicide prevention, cancer and heart disease – utilizing current and producing new next-generation supercomputing designs at ORNL. This will accelerate the process of identifying trends to support the development of new treatments and preventive strategies.

Over the past two decades, the VA has collected health data trend information from about 24 million veterans who have used VA for healthcare. The Department of Veterans Affairs partnered DOE, and ORNL specifically, to use high-performance computing capabilities to allow a large number of researchers access to this unprecedented data resource over time in a secure environment. This will enable transformative science that will improve health care for veterans and all Americans. All safeguards are in place to protect the records at the scientific computing facilities in Oak Ridge National Laboratory.