Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW)

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is increasingly dependent upon data. Most of its employees generate and use vast amounts of data on a daily basis. To improve our capacity for data analysis while providing the most efficient and the highest quality health care to our Veteran patients, VHA, working with the VA Office of Information and Technology, implemented a health data warehouse. Central to this plan is consolidating data from disparate sources into a coherent single logical data model. The Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW) is the physical implementation of this logical data model at the enterprise level for VHA. Although the CDW initially began to store data as early as 2006, a renewed effort began in 2010 to accelerate CDW's content by including more subject areas from Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) and content from other existing national data systems. CDW supports fully developed subject areas in its production environment as well as supporting rapid prototyping by extracting data directly from source systems with very minor data transformations. The Regional Data Warehouses and the Veterans Integrated Service Network (VISN) Data Warehouses share content from CDW and allow for greater reporting flexibility at the local level throughout the VHA organization.