Open VA Data Sets to Non-VA Researchers

To the Editor There is debate about whether patient outcomes at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities are comparable to those at other facilities¹; such information may inform what role VA should have in US health care.²

In a Research Letter in a recent issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, Blay et al³ compared the performance of 129 VA hospitals to 4010 non-VA hospitals based on data from 2012 to 2015 sourced from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare program. With hospital-level data, Blay et al,³ who do not have VA affiliations, found that VA hospitals had considerably lower 30-day risk-adjusted mortality rates and modestly lower 30-day risk-adjusted readmission rates for acute myocardial infarction (AMI), pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and congestive heart failure (CHF).