Completing the Record of Care
Housed at the Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Health Data Compass (HDC) is a data warehouse supporting a broad range of health care research. The warehouse integrates information from multiple sources including:
- University of Colorado Hospital,
- Children’s Hospital Colorado,
- CU Medicine,
- Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment (CDPHE),
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and
- Colorado All Payer Claims Database (CO APCD).
Since 2017, users of HDC have been able to access information via data marts and data visualization tools such as Tableau or the programming language R in a secure, HIPAA-compliant, Google Cloud Platform.
Incorporation of claims data from the CO APCD allows HDC users to track patients outside of the UC Health systems, providing a more complete view of each individual’s health and utilization of health care services. HDC receives regular data sets from the CO APCD to ensure that their warehouse contains the most timely and credible information available. To generate each data set, “finder files” are used to match records in the UC Health system to claims in the CO APCD using a variety of criteria.
CO APCD data, alongside electronic health records, information about the social determinants of health (CDPHE) and the weather (NOAA), make HDC a powerful resource for medical and health care research. In 2021, 36 journal articles were published using data from HDC and with 2022 on track to meet or exceed the same number. Study topics range from condition-specific research to investigations into cost and service utilization.