Wednesday, April 2, 2025
4/2/2025
Improving and Enhancing the US Vision and Eye Health Surveillance System - Since 2015, NORC and CDC have established and enhanced the Vision and Eye Health Surveillance System (VEHSS). VEHSS creates and presents surveillance information using secondary data sources, including nationally representative surveys, administrative payment claims, electronic health records (EHRs), and composite estimates for high importance conditions. Today, VEHSS is the largest repository of vision and eye health prevalence information globally, providing public access to 246 indicators of vision impairment and blindness, eye health conditions, and service utilization measured across 11 data sources. The next three years provide the opportunity to continue to enhance and improve VEHSS through 1. Increasing the system's social determinants of health (SDOH) and comorbidity information, 2. Adding data from populations not included in VEHSS, 3. Improving the VEHSS website's accessibility and usability, 4. Streamlining VEHSS indicators, 5. Maintaining and adding additional years of data for existing VEHSS indicators, and 6. Publishing VEHSS results and promoting their availability to the public. We offer solutions for each of these opportunities. NORC provides immediate access to new data from the Veteran's Health Administration, Medicare Advantage, the National Health and Aging Trends Study, uninterrupted access to current VEHSS data sources and models, and the analysis code and expertise to put these data sources to work. We additionally provide a framework for evaluating new sources of SDOH and EHR data for inclusion and provide options to include data from the Indian Health Service. Helping users find the information they need is a primary challenge for VEHSS. The scheduled VEHSS 3.0 (Fall 2022 release) update partially addresses this challenge by reorganizing VEHSS indicators by condition instead of data source and vastly improving indicator search and site navigation. We will devote the next three years to additional steps to add data discovery and visualization features and improve the VEHSS 3.0 architecture and content. We propose a Healthy People 2030 Dashboard to provide quick access to the nation's visual health performance measures and SDOH visualization solutions. We will review and revise website text and content to increase readability, streamline VEHSS indicators using objective criteria, and identify surveillance gaps and important new indicators. NORC's dissemination plan includes publications, lay-person summaries, videos, webinars, presentations, and amplification by our partners using their social media channels and email lists. We propose using Adobe Analytics reports more aggressively to identify the VEHSS information that is most often accessed and use this information to inform our dissemination products. NORC's staff and collaborative partners offer CDC unmatched experience with the VEHSS system and content area knowledge in vision and eye health, chronic disease surveillance, biostatistics, epidemiology, communications, informatics, data visualization, and implementing creative web development solutions within the agency-wide security and accessibility constraints of the CDC.gov website. We provide an articulated work plan that describes exactly when each step of the project will occur and a detailed evaluation plan linking project activities to their performance measures. We have successfully established, maintained, and enhanced VEHSS over the last seven years and can continue to do so over the next three years. NORC provides CDC with a partner that ensures uninterrupted maintenance of VEHSS and can invest the next three years towards continued improvement and enhancements rather than re-building.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).