The Career History Archival Medical and Personnel System (CHAMPS): An Epidemiological Data Resource for Force Health Protection

Abstract

The concept of force health protection depends on the ability to readily ascertain environmental factors that may be related to deployments or occupational exposures and examine subsequent medical and personnel outcomes, including hospitalizations (1). The Career History Archival Medical and Personnel System (CHAMPS) is a comprehensive database that provides an archival career and medical history for active-duty military personnel organized at the level of the individual in a chronological narrative format. Key career and military events are coded and recorded in order by event date. In this way, a military service member can be tracked from accession to service separation. Because of this unique design the CHAMPS system is ideally suited for use in conducting longitudinal observational studies using a variety of career-related variables to define exposure. CHAMPS has been used to study factors associated with the incidence of HIV seroconversion (2-7), including risk of HIV seroconversion following visits to foreign ports by Navy personnel (8). CHAMPS has been used to study the incidence of first hospitalization for a variety of chronic and infectious diseases and injuries in active-duty personnel potentially associated with military occupation or duty-station assignment (9-21). Studies of chronic disease include incidence of outcomes such as diabetes (9), Hodgkin's disease (10) and non-Hodgkins lymphoma (11) and testicular cancer (12) and melanoma (13). CHAMPS was used to conduct studies of leukemia in both active-duty personnel (14) and their children (15). Injury studies include studies of the incidence of heat stress (17), eye injury (18), carpal tunnel syndrome (19) and others (20). Data sets from CHAMPS have also been used as a basis for epidemiologic modeling and have been used to define populations at risk in the military according to demographic or service characteristics.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA433771

Entities

People

  • E. K. Gunderson
  • Edward D. Gorham
  • Frank C. Garland
  • Milan Miller

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Active Duty
  • Cancer
  • Department Of Defense
  • Enlisted Personnel
  • Health Services
  • Hiv Infections
  • Hospitalizations
  • Lung Diseases
  • Medical Personnel
  • Military Medicine
  • Military Personnel
  • Military Training
  • Neoplasms
  • Personnel Management
  • Pregnancy Complications
  • Therapy

Fields of Study

  • Medicine

Readers

  • Infectious Disease/Epidemiology
  • Personnel Management and Statistics in the Military and Department of Defense
  • Women's Health and Cancer Risk Research: African American Women and Pregnancy Outcomes.