The Career History Archival Medical and Personnel System is a database that provides information on cancer, chronic diseases, occupational and preventive medicine, epidemiological research, and the use of health care in the Navy and Marine Corps. It was created at the Naval Health Research Center for enlisted Navy personnel, and it is being expanded to encompass all military personnel. Its objective is to provide a comprehensive, chronologically ordered database of career and medical events in all active duty military service members and to track career and disease events in order from the date of entry to service to the date service ended. Events include the dates of beginning and ending of each specific military occupation, all assignments to a military units or ships, all hospitalized diseases, and other events. The database contains detailed epidemiological data on more than six million members of the military services. It is the largest known epidemiological database in the United States.
This article describes the design and uses of the Career History Archival Medical and Personnel System (CHAMPS), a comprehensive database of career and medical information on all individuals who have served on active duty in the Navy and Marine Corps, and, in more recent years, all Department of Defense (DoD) services.1 The database covers the period from January 1, 1965 to the present for enlisted Navy service members. For all other services, medical events and denominator data are available from 1988 to the present. This report describes use of the database for epidemiological research on health and performance in the military.
Methods
CHAMPS was developed and is maintained by the Naval Health Research Center (NHRC) in San Diego, California. The CHAMPS system compiles highly detailed career and medical histories on individuals in the military from a variety of sources. Records are arranged for each individual as events in chronological order, and a set of event records for an individual provides a logical and comprehensive history from his/her time of enlistment to his/her time of ending service. Each event record contains variables that reflect the type and date of the event and the member’s status at the time of the event. There are two categories of event records: career and medical.
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