In a significant milestone for University of California (UC) San Diego, the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute (ACTRI), and the Division of Biomedical Informatics, the contract for the California Integrated Vital Records System (Cal-IVRS), one of the most advanced vital records systems in the world, was recently renewed for a period of three more years through June of 2027. This contract, a $25 million interagency agreement between UC San Diego and the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), highlights UC’s more than 42 years of unwavering commitment to providing the best-in-class electronic vital records and statistics for California. This collaborative effort will continue to be led by the Division of Bioinformatics faculty, Amy Sitapati, M.D. and Michael Hogarth, M.D., who also serves as the ACTRI Director of Bioinformatics and UC San Diego’s inaugural Clinical Research Information Officer.
Data generated from the registration of vital events (births, deaths, fetal deaths) is critical for driving public health policies in today’s world and has both legal and epidemiological implications in the modern society. The federal government funds the acquisition of vital statistics data from states and territories through a variety of cooperative programs across both the National Center for Health Statistics, a part of the CDC, and Social Security Administration. While most states began manually entering vital records registration data into a centralized computer at the state offices by the early 1980s, Ron Williams of UC Santa Barbara was the first one to computerize the capture of vital events data at the source when he developed and implemented the Automated Vital Statistics System (AVSS) in 1982. AVSS, over nearly three decades, was very successful in registering over 27 million birth events in California. In 2004, Dr. Hogarth’s team developed CA-EDRS, a pioneering web-based death registration system, which began service for the CDPH on January 1, 2005, and has since processed over 4.2 million death certificates. In 2018, the system was upgraded to include birth registrations and transitioned from UC Davis to UC San Diego, with Dr. Sitapati joining the leadership. Now known as the Cal-IVRS, it is one of the world's most advanced electronic vital records systems…
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