Austin Information Technology Center
Located in Austin, Texas, the AITC is aligned under VA Office of Information and Technology (OI&T) and is one of four centers that make up VA’s Corporate Data Center Operations. In 1996, the AITC was approved as a franchise fund organization with the authority to offer IT products and services to other federal agencies on a full cost recovery, fee-for-service basis. No appropriated funding is provided to franchise fund organizations, so the AITC collects revenue from its customers for the services it provides in order to manage the center’s day-today operation. AITC operates with a private industry mindset, with the additional benefit that its goal is to provide services to government customers at the lowest possible cost.
24/7 OPERATION
The AITC provides a full complement of IT services to customers nationwide within the federal public sector, including both VA and non-VA customers. These services include a host of technical solutions to best accomplish all tasks associated with customers’ varied IT projects. The AITC services portfolio includes IT systems hosting services; applications management; 24/7 help desk support, IT service continuity management, Web design and hosting, information assurance and data conversion; and application integration services. The AITC has experience with all major operating systems for mainframe, UNIX, Windows and Linux platforms, and offers a wide range of platform hosting services. AITC hosting services also include a variety of data storage options such as direct access storage device (DASD) and remote data vaulting for disaster recovery, as well as near-line and off-line tape storage. A variety of computer output services such as print and CD-ROM creation are also offered. AITC maintains well over 500 systems in Austin.
AITC operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. State-of-the-art tools and computing environment combined with an experienced IT staff provide a processing infrastructure that is highly scalable, reliable, and secure. The AITC also supports commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) packages as well as internally and externally developed solutions for federal customers. Enterprise application management is under the direction of certified PMP and Level III project managers. Along with benefits, health, management and financial applications, the AITC supports several VA-wide medical systems, including ones promoting VA and Department of Defense information sharing.
HEALTHEVET
AITC is a key participant in VA’s health information modernization effort known as HealtheVet. HealtheVet is the next generation of VistA (Veterans Health Systems Information and Technology Architecture—VA’s current health information system) and will retain all of the capabilities of legacy VistA in addition to providing enhanced flexibility for future health care and compliance with the One-VA Enterprise Java architecture. It will allow seamless data sharing between all parts of VA to benefit veterans and their families.
HealtheVet is a strategy built around five major systems: enrollment that brings a veteran into VA health and benefits systems; a health data system to create a true longitudinal health care record, including data from VA and non-VA sources; provider systems used in direct patient care; management and financial systems; and information and education systems.
As part of the health data system component of HealtheVet, the AITC operates several major interagency health information sharing systems for VA, including Clinical Data Repository/Health Data Repository (CHDR), a combined effort between DoD and VA to exchange pharmacy, allergy and clinical lab information for TRICARE and HealtheVet beneficiaries. CHDR enables VA’s Health Data Repository (HDR) and the DoD’s Clinical Data Repository (CDR) to share computable outpatient pharmacy and drug allergy information for shared patients. CDR is the component within the DoD Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application (AHLTA) that centrally stores patient health care history for all beneficiaries of the DoD TRICARE system. Similarly, HDR centrally stores patient health care history for all beneficiaries in VA HealtheVet system. Once transferred, data from DoD becomes part of a VA patient’s medical record and vice versa. CHDR is an important step toward VA/DoD interoperability.
My HealtheVet is the Internet-based component of HealtheVet that creates a new, online environment where veterans, family and clinicians come together to optimize veterans’ health care. It provides trusted information, online services, health record access and messaging between veterans and clinicians. Web technology combines essential health record information enhanced by online health resources to enable and encourage patient/clinician collaboration.
VA AND DOD INFORMATION SHARING
The AITC also supports the Bi-Directional Health Information Exchange (BHIE), a joint information technology data exchange initiative between VA and DoD. BHIE permits VA and DoD clinicians to view electronic health care data from each other’s systems: VA’s Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) and DoD’s Composite Health Care System (CHCS). The data are shared bidirectionally, in real time, for patients who receive care from both VA and DoD facilities.
Currently, the data that is made viewable bidirectionally using BHIE includes outpatient pharmacy data, allergy data, patient identification correlation, laboratory result data including surgical pathology reports, cytology and microbiology data, chemistry and hematology data, lab orders data, and radiology reports. BHIE is implemented at select DoD military facilities and at all VA medical facilities. BHIE permits DoD providers to view BHIE data from all VA medical facilities and VA to view BHIE data from the DoD facilities where BHIE is implemented. VA and DoD are continuing to support the expansion of BHIE to additional DoD facilities.
REGISTRIES AND DATABASES
In addition to these efforts, the AITC houses a number of national registries and databases, such as the Environmental Agents Services Registries (EAS). EAS, a program under VA’s Public Health and Environmental Hazards Office, collects information on veterans that may have been exposed to environmental hazards during their periods of service. The registries include the Gulf War Registry, which collects information on veterans who served in the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.
In addition, the Depleted Uranium Registry collects information about exposure to vehicles, ammunition and embedded fragments that contain depleted uranium; the Agent Orange Registry for Vietnam-era veterans collects information on veterans that may have been exposed to agent orange or other herbicides; and the Ionization/ Radiation registry collects information on veterans that may have been exposed to radiation during their period of service.
Clinical Case Registry (CCR) software supports patient safety and care quality management at the population level for veterans with hepatitis C and/or human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, and supports Veterans Equitable Reimbursement Allocation (VERA) modeling. CCR merges all previously separate hepatitis C and HIV registry software components into one package using the CCR platform and one graphical user interface (GUI).
This software allows VA medical facilities to maintain confidential registries for clinical and administrative use, and significantly enhances their ability to produce customized reports at the local level. Selected information from the local system is automatically transmitted to a national database housed at the AITC and the Center for Quality Management in Public Health (CQM).
National data are used for epidemiology and public health, quality and safety initiatives, performance measures development, VERA modeling and research.Liver Disease Database (LDD) is a primary mission of VA Hepatitis C Resource Center (HCRC) Program to improve the care of veterans with hepatitis C viral infection.
Over the past decade, it has become increasingly apparent that the incidence of end-stage liver disease (ESLD) and its complications is rapidly increasing. These complications include hepatocellular carcinoma, variceal hemorrhage, ascites, encephalopathy, and the need for liver transplantation. VA LDD will be an important tool for VA HCRC Program, as well as other VA policymakers and leadership, to identify gaps in the care of patients with liver disease, monitor performance, develop new interventions to improve care and assess the impact of these interventions.
EXECUTIVE DECISION-MAKING SUPPORT
The AITC also supports applications that help with executive-level decision-making and clinical administration, such as Decision Support System (DSS) and patient appointment applications. DSS uses clinical and financial data to provide activity-based costing and clinical productivity analyses. DSS records costs for over one billion pieces of utilization (drugs, bed days and X-rays). In fiscal year 2007, DSS became the managerial cost accounting system for Veterans Health Administration, Veterans Benefits Administration and National Cemetery Administration. The Patient Appointments Information Tracking (PAIT) system collects identifier information for each appointment.
It includes patients who are waiting for clinic appointments and primary care panel assignments, based on veterans with greater than or equal to 50 percent serviceconnected disabilities. Electronic Wait List (EWL) is a summary of patient data sent in for PAIT. EWL serves as a tool for VA’s medical facilities to track and analyze the different types of patients on this list.
DATA PROTECTION
Ensuring the confidentiality, integrity and availability of customer data is critically important at the AITC. AITC stands ready to assist customers in navigating the evolving requirements of certification and accreditation (C&A) to include security planning and continuity of operations. A key component of safeguarding customers’ important information is business continuity planning (BCP). Customers can take advantage of AITC’s proven business continuity programs, including disaster planning, application recovery and utilizing electronic data vaulting.
The AITC is also experienced in data conversion and ETML (extracting, transforming, moving and loading) data from legacy systems to new applications, migrating a customer’s applications processing from its current processing center to the AITC, and consolidating processing of applications onto larger servers. The AITC uses middleware (BEA Tuxedo Transaction Manager, Sun E-Gate Messaging Interface Engine, Vitria SOA Platform and XML Technologies) for commercial messaging and queuing that provides the flexibility and scalability to allow true application integration. The middleware provides universal application connectors, enabling programs to communicate across a network of heterogeneous components such as processors, operating systems, subsystems and communication protocols, using a simple and consistent application programming interface (API) across all platforms.
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION IS KEY
The AITC considers itself to be a business partner with every customer and strives to sustain excellent customer relationships. AITC’s success in obtaining this is the result of its customer-centric attitude focusing technologies and business improvements around the customer, as well as making sound, fiscally responsible decisions that support the customer. For the ninth consecutive year, AITC contracted with Gartner to conduct an independent satisfaction survey of its VA and other government agency customers in late FY08.
Both private sector companies and public sector organizations have similarly contracted with Gartner to administer their information technology customer satisfaction (ITCS) survey. The survey uses standard criteria questions to allow for benchmarking across peer groups. Of the nearly 300 surveys conducted within the peer group of both private sector and public sector organizations, the AITC scored within the top 12 percent of overall satisfaction scores. ♦
AITC’s Website is www.aac.va.gov. They can also be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .