The purpose of this Agreement is to delineate the terms and conditions by which the National Institutes of Health/ National Institute on Aging agree to purchase seats in the CMS Virtual Research Data Center (VRDC). CMS data, which include Medicare, Medicaid, and long-term care data (OASIS and MDS), are currently used by NIH/NIA researchers to conduct many innovative studies in support of the NIH/NIA mission. For example, the impact of Medicare on service utilization and health outcomes, projections of future healthcare expenditures, and estimates of the burden of Alzheimers disease, among others. Currently applicants budget cost to acquire CMS data in the application and NIH/NIA pays grantees through RPG funds (direct and indirect cost) to acquire the data in perpetuity (usually until the end of the grant period). The cost varies from few thousand dollars (re-use) to more than one hundred thousand dollars depending on the amount of data requested. A virtual data access as proposed by CMS can potentially be an efficient and secure method of providing data to a large number of users, with a variety of different research needs than the current process where CMS cuts, encrypts, and ships large quantities of PHI.
