GECDAC Services and Products
Geriatrics & Extended Care Data & Analysis Center’s (GECDAC) knowledge and research support is available to help authorized VA operational and research teams conducting evaluations to improve access, coverage and quality of healthcare and services provided to aging and frail Veterans.
Here is a two-page summary of GECDAC services and products. For questions and information on availability contact us at GECDAC@va.gov.
GECDAC Services
Program Evaluation – provides accurate and timely evaluations of the quality of care and access to services provided to frail Veterans, and the quality, effectiveness and costs of those services.
Program Outreach – helps find Veterans who could qualify and benefit from participation in Geriatrics & Extended Care (GEC) programs.
Measure & Risk Score Development/ Validation – uses data to develop and validate identification of Veterans who might need GEC services. Risk scores useful for comparing GEC programs across VA locations are produced to ensure that the comparisons are correct.
Analysis Planning and Protocol Development – helps VA providers in VA locations nationally, and VA Central Office by creating tools that help manage and plan GEC services provided to frail Veterans. GECDAC also assists VA research groups who need advanced analytic planning or help in designing their studies.
Leadership Data Support – provides information and analysis to inform VA Central Office decisions and present GEC information to external stakeholders.
Data Support to VA Field Offices – provides data and analytics on the services used by Veterans and their costs to VA or Medicare to support and inform field projects.
GEC Data Sharing – consults with data owners to provide access to data that has been cleaned (identification and/or removal of incomplete, inaccurate or irrelevant parts of the data) or customized (e.g., adding summaries such as risk scores) and provides access to data summaries and visualizations, and data retrieval macros.
GECDAC Data Products
JEN Frailty Index (JFI) – a risk score that uses recorded diagnoses to measure the risk of admissions to nursing home for prolonged stays. GECDAC holds a license from Westat (formerly JEN Associates) to produce JFI scores within VA.
Independence at Home Qualification (IAH-Q) – a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) program that is modeled after the VA’s Home Based Primary Care program. IAH-qualification (IAH-Q) is the VA version of the eligibility criteria used by the IAH program. A person meets IAH-Q criteria if they have 2+ chronic conditions, need assistance with 2+ activities of daily living (ADLs), have had a hospital admission within the last 12 months, and received post-acute services such as rehabilitation in a nursing home in the last 12 months. GECDAC changed the IAH criteria by switching the ADL requirement with a requirement that the JEN Frailty Index based on diagnoses in the past 12 months is greater than 5.
CLC Staffing Data – information about the total number of hours nurses (RNs, LPNs and CNAs) care for patients in Community Living Centers each day.
Residential History Files (RHFs) – the Residential History Methodology uses data from VA, Medicare and Medicaid and nursing home resident assessments to provide a daily summary of an individual’s health service utilization and location of care. The method is applied to particular groups of patients and periods of time. For example, all nursing VA enrollees who used nursing homes between 2007-2019. GECDAC creates RHFs for its own use, for example, to examine services used in the last year of life. It also creates RHFs to look at certain groups and times. It also creates project specific RHFs based on requests from qualified VA employees. RHFs may be shared with qualified VA employees.
GECDAC Core Files (GCF) – a dataset that includes information on all Veterans who used the Veterans Health Administration in a fiscal year. GCF combines information from many VA and non-VA sources capturing health care utilization, costs, risk factors and outcomes for each Veteran. The focus is on the provision of GEC services.
GEC Cohort Report – annual and quarterly summaries of all Veterans using GEC services, nationally. Includes information on their use, VA total and direct costs and Medicare use and costs. Information is categorized by GEC service, including institutional and non-institutional care.
GCF Discover - Presents users, utilization and cost is summarized over all Veterans in their primary VAMC/fiscal year (2010-2023). Provides comparisons to national and VISN benchmarks. Filters by age groups, frailty groups, priority status, rural, and dementia.
