Host organizations need to collect anonymized client data both to show the impact of their CVITP clinic to their stakeholders and to provide the information needed to improve the CVITP service they are offering.

There are two ways that a host organization can get this data: ask the CRA for it or collect it independently.  Last year, we argued the case for why host organizations should ask the CRA for their anonymized client data.

In this article, we recount our own experience earlier this year of helping some host organizations in our area to ask the CRA for the data.  We outline some lessons we learned from that experience.

While we were successful in getting the CRA to share some of its data, read here about the problems we encountered interpreting this data.  Our experience suggests this approach to getting data would be useful only for a limited number of host organizations.  It provides host organizations with one possible benefit but not the full range of advantages one could expect from the data currently collected by the CRA.  For host organizations that want the full range of advantages from the data, the best approach is to collect it themselves.  Advice on this latter approach will be the subject of a future article.