The Army and Air Force this month completed the largest training and technology deployment effort to date under an Army-managed electronic medical records program.
The Army’s Medical Communications for Combat Casualty Care (MC4) program delivers a medical information management system that captures patient records. Those records are housed in the Defense Department’s central clinical data repository, where they are available for healthcare providers.
The recent rollout marks “the completion of equipping all level three medical treatment facilities in Southwest Asia,” the Army said.
Maj. Gen. Charles Green, deputy surgeon general of the Air Force, said the partnership enabled “seamless care through a common medical software suite.”
In the program’s latest phase, MC4 technical support teams trained 300 medical personnel of the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Support Group, the Army said. In addition, more than 200 ruggedized systems were provided to healthcare professionals at the Air Force Theater Hospital, Balad, Iraq. The systems will be used to electronically capture patient records, the Army said.
Green said the implementation of MC4 is providing capability in the combat zone “to document patient care as a permanent part of the electronic medical record for all warfighters.”
The MC4 program fields Panasonic Toughbook CF 51 ruggedized notebooks and Hewlett-Packard iPaq 4700 PDAs.
Overall, about 200 medical treatment facilities use MC4. The Army Program Executive Office, Enterprise Information Systems, oversees MC4.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
