November 18, 2014 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Virtual Research Data Center

Virtual Research Data Center - Overview Remote access to Chronic Condition Data Warehouse (CCW), the national Medicare and Medicaid research database Virtual research environment providing timelier access to Medicare and Medicaid program data in a more efficient and cost effective manner Up to 500 GB of space per user for data and analysis Set price/year/seat May be less expensive than current cost of obtaining portable media if requesting several years of data or very large cohort Greater flexibility with number of years/files needed for research Data management centralized within the environment Can download aggregate results Eliminates the need for acquisition of equipment to store and analyze data 2

Virtual Research Data Center - Overview Secure access to: Medicare Part A (including MedPAR) and B claims 1999-current Medicare Part D events 2006-current Medicare and Medicaid eligibility/enrollment 1999-current National Death Index data (for Medicare , for Medicaid ) Assessment data from 1999-current (includes MDS, OASIS, IRFPAI, swing bed) Analytic files: summary cost and utilization, characteristics files for use with encrypted Part D event data, Geographic Variation Database, linked Medicare-Medicaid data files 3

Virtual Research Data Center – CCW Infrastructure 800 TB space in environment (459 TB allocated) Scalable 2 PB of storage 14+ years 100% Medicare and Medicaid enrollment, administrative, enrollment, drug, and death certificate data from 1999-forward 315 billion records 31 billion Part B claims + 6 billion Part A claims + 11 billion Part D event records = more than 48 billion claims/events 1 billion records added monthly SAS Analytic Grid supported by 5 compute tier servers Oracle Database RAC Cluster supported by 6 compute nodes Virtual Desktop Infrastructure to enhance end user experience 4

Virtual Research Data Center - Cost Access priced by the number of ‘seats’ Seat is defined as individual with direct access into the VRDC environment Annual seat cost is $40,000 Can have other seats for the same project for $15,000/year Additional space can be purchased; $2,000 for each 500GB of additional space Specifics on pricing are found in the CMS VRDC FAQs: 5

Virtual Research Data Center – Requesting Access Research Data Assistance Center assists researchers with review of materials and answering questions about data files, cost, and process Must obtain IRB approval Requests reviewed and approved by CMS Privacy Board See the ResDAC VRDC request website for list of materials (previous slide) Access to VRDC occurs after CMS DUA approved Standard SAS datasets within SAS Enterprise Guide VRDC Technical Analysts extract non-standard data and move to user’s library 6

Virtual Research Data Center – Process Flow 7

Virtual Research Data Center – ccwdata.org 8

Technical analytic guidance from experienced analysts Service desk support Resources available on User training sessions, live WebEx sessions, video recordings Website resources - training videos, user guides, FAQs, data models, data dictionaries, analytic and technical guidance documents Summary statistics and interactive business intelligence reports 9

Virtual Research Data Center – login 10

Virtual Research Data Center – VPN login 11

Virtual Research Data Center - Virtual Desktop 12

Virtual Research Data Center File Transfer Request System / Upload 13

Virtual Research Data Center File Transfer Request System / Upload (cont.) 14

Virtual Research Data Center Statistical Output Review Process 15

Virtual Research Data Center File Download Process 16

Virtual Research Data Center - Technical Assistance Technical analytic guidance Help desk support User training sessions – onsite in Owings Mills, live WebEx sessions, video recordings Website resources - training videos, user guides, FAQs, data models, data dictionaries, analytic and technical guidance documents Summary statistics and interactive business intelligence reports via CCW website portal 17

For More Information Research Data Assistance Center VRDC Help Desk CCW website: Thank you! CMS Virtual Research Data Center 18