Scaling Up Healthcare Data Innovations: Lessons Learned from VA’s Summit Data Platform Journey

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the nation’s largest health system with 170 VA Medical Centers and over a 1000 outpatient clinics, serving over 9 million beneficiaries, and employing almost 400,000 employees. Three years ago, VA Office of Technology (OIT) embarked on the development of the Summit Data Platform (SDP) to centralize and modernize data and analytics across the VA enterprise. Today, SDP supports over 30 use cases from Long COVID care, suicide prevention, cancer care tracking, clinical deterioration, veteran experience, and many more. These use cases include some of the most progressive technological efforts at VA with the use of Large Language Models (LLMs), self-service analytics on the cloud, and real-time streaming analytics.