Enough health care data for an army: The million veteran program

The goal of the Million Veteran Program is to understand how genes affect health. As the project steams ahead, it is reducing the cost of research, shortening the time it takes to generate research results, and building a data infrastructure to allow for new kinds of analysis that will eventually lead to individual gene-based therapies for all veterans. In an interview, J. Michael Gaziano and Saiju Pyarajan, two of the programu0027s lead scientists, explain the protocols and infrastructure of the project. Managing complex security and risk is perhaps their greatest challenge, which they are addressing on several fronts: all personal data collected for the study is stored behind a firewall in VA data centers at secure VA facilities; different data domains are separated using a system that prevents cross-referencing; and each participants data is stored with appropriate security both for data in motion as well as at rest, making it closer to impossible to identify personal data across all data domains.