The program to bridge the e-health record (EHR) systems of the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs will be substantially complete a year from now, representatives of the departments told Congress today.
Additional kinds of medical information about the patients treated by both medical systems are becoming available to doctors in the Veterans Health Administration and the Military Health System this month, and more incremental improvements will follow, they said.
Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.), chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, said he was pleased that “DOD and VA have made more progress is the past 12 to 18 months than they made in the preceding decade.”
The two departments made little progress after beginning their EHR-sharing initiative in 2001, and members of the subcommittee expressed some skepticism about today’s glowing reports of interdepartmental cooperation.
For example, Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D-Texas) said, “We know the Department of Defense has been stonewalling us” about the progress or lack of progress in some areas of data sharing with VA.
But VA and DOD officials pointed to specific improvements in their ability to exchange information about their patients. This month, the two departments are beginning to share information on inpatient consultations and operating reports, and VA doctors can obtain records of soldiers’ battlefield treatment.
In December, physicians will share notes on patient encounters and problem lists. Also, VA doctors will be able to get inpatient records from the Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where most wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan are airlifted for treatment before they return to the United States.
In other developments at today’s hearing, the subcommittee was told that:
A joint feasibility study on developing a shared information system for inpatient care is proceeding. A contractor is due to produce a report in May. “I will be surprised if we do not take the information from that study and make it happen,” said Stephen Jones, principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs.
The Joint Patient Tracking Application (JPTA), a much-heralded system for tracking wounded patients as they travel from battlefields to field hospitals and then Landstuhl or elsewhere, will be merged into the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application, DOD’s EHR system.
VA has adapted JPTA for its own use, creating the Veterans Tracking Application, which can share information with JPTA.
Even when VA and DOD doctors can readily obtain each others’ records on shared patients, work will continue to upgrade the systems and make them less reliant on noncomputable text data.
Government Health IT will present Liesa Jo Jenkins, executive director of CareSpark, in an eSeminar at 11 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 16, where she will share her experiences and insight into building a health information exchange that enhances community health, rewards regional collaboration and drives economic progress.
