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https://www.psypost.org/secret-changes-to-major-u-s-health-datasets-raise-alarms/
I had to do a double take when I saw this article because I was on the exact team at the VA that did (part of) this. The reddit discussion is being hysterical about data loss but as the article reflects, the changes were purely to column headers and data element names-- or at least, that was what I heard during meetings. (I didn't actually make any of the changes, it was very much "not my job".) The bigger issue is that it sounds like the VA failed to advertise what happened to outside stakeholders. In case any of them are listening... the data tracks and has always tracked the sex at birth, and has never included the gender identity. The columns were called "gender" for the historical reason that the medical field didn't always view gender as being separate from sex.
In effect the whole change was just CYA thing-- the big bosses were making a stink about culture war stuff, and they spat out the easiest possible fix. So far as I know this had no actual impact on any healthcare measures. I can't rule out the existence of eCQM that include gender identity, and there's a (now-deprecated) FHIR extension for gender identity. but frankly I doubt we ever used it. Our data source didn't even keep track of ethnicity, which gets used as a supplement for basically every QDM measure.
Basically a waste of time, and therefore money. Being optimistic, maybe it'll be less confusing for measure developers, but it's hilarious to me that the conservative administration was basically ceding the point here by differentiating at the schema level that "sex" is different than "gender".
This seems like a great example of vibes based thinking from both ends.
The change is made because it has some slight vibes of being woke (since the column is called gender) so that's good enough to score an easy win. And it's without much effort, which a lot of them seem to be really lazy and uncaring with this work given how they've messed up multiple times this same way with the Enola Gay or that Army Corp biologist page that included fish gender. I'm not even kidding
Nobody wants to do an in-depth investigation or look through data because that's boring and the only benefit is that you might have to say "sorry boss I looked at it and I didn't find woke" when you can instead go and say "Boss we removed 200k instances of woke"
And then people online are upset without even knowing the details because it has the vibes of being against the Trump admin despite it most likely not being any data deletion and just a change in header.
Fish... ah, pretty clearly don't have gender? It can be pretty hard to even tell what sex they are without cutting them open, nevermind enquiring as to their feelings as to the roles imposed upon them by fish society.
Maybe next time the Army Corp biologists will write their report using proper scientific language; serves them right if you ask me.
Agreed, either gender matters or it doesn't. If it matters, then they used it wrong and should be scolded for it.
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