CIRSS Seminar: Maria Souden

Maria Souden, acting director of the VA Information Resource Center (VIReC), will give the talk, "Challenges and Opportunities in Curating VA Administrative and Clinical Data for Reuse."

The Veterans Health Administration is the largest integrated health care system in the U.S., with over 1,700 sites of care serving 8.76 million Veterans each year. Large amounts of clinical, administrative and financial data from the VA can deepen our understanding of health outcomes, patterns and impacts. Working with these data present both tremendous opportunities and significant challenges for health services researchers. The VA Information Resource Center (VIReC) mission is to advance VA capacity to use data effectively for research and quality improvement and to foster communication between research data users and the VA healthcare community. VIReC produces knowledge about VA data and how to use it, informs and educates researchers through dissemination of that knowledge, and collaborates with data stewards to address issues affecting research use of data. This talk will describe the critical data curation challenges that occur with such a diverse set of data and users, and how community practices around data reuse can overcome some of those challenges.

 Maria Souden is acting director of the VA Information Resource Center, where she leads strategy development for supporting the use of VA data as well as collaborative efforts with other VA offices to improve VA's data environment. She holds a master's and a PhD from the University of Michigan School of Information. Souden is a CIRSS-affiliated researcher whose current research focuses on information behavior, usability, and knowledge sharing in online communities and distributed information environments.

This event is sponsored by CIRSS