The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) maintains the largest health care system in the United States. In FY-2000, the VA oversaw the operation of 163 hospitals, over 500 Community Based Outpatient clinics (CBOCs), 163 hospital-based outpatient clinics and 4 independent outpatient clinics, 134 nursing homes, 40 domiciliaries, and 4 mobile clinics. VA has electronically captured data on the VA patient population for decades and its patient data systems are second to none. The massive amount of data available for analysis, however, can be overwhelming to the researcher, planner or decision maker who needs to translate these data into usable information. The VA Health Care Atlas team created the VA Health Care Atlas, FY-2000 to synthesize information frequently requested by field researchers, managers, and planners and to highlight the Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI) program.

Objectives
The goal of this Service Directed Research project was to create a product that would enhance knowledge of VA’s enrolled patient population and their health care utilization and, ultimately, to provide background information that will improve the formulation of specific research questions to address those needs. The VA Health Care Atlas, FY-2000 includes:

• A profile of the veteran population from the Census 2000 decennial survey
• An overview and the location of medical facilities in the VA health care system in FY-2000
• A summary VA’s enrollee population in FY-2000
• An examination of overall VA utilization in FY-2000
• Patterns of health care use and costs in FY-2000 by specific patient disease categories:

This project was funded as a Service Directed Research Project by Health Services Research & Development Service (SDR 01-175).

The VA Health Care team would like to acknowledge the many individuals and Offices within VA and VHA who contributed to this volume. In particular, we thank our Steering Committee who provided guidance and suggestions throughout the process of generating this Atlas. The Steering Committee members, who we cannot thank enough for their input, advice, and suggestions are as follows:

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Magda Berger, VA Palo Alto, CA, for calculating the costs and creating the cost tables for the Atlas. Additionally, we are grateful to Scott Miskevics, Hines VHA, for the compilation of the diagnosis code descriptions used to define our patient cohorts.