Army Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the medical information systems that support the Defense Department’s battlefield medics, has won the 2007 Outstanding Medical Information Management Executive Award from the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States (AMSUS).
The award recognizes a senior executive in military or public health who has made “outstanding contributions to federal health care through demonstrated superior leadership and visionary management ability.”
Pentagon officials credit Hines with getting four strategic sets of battlefield systems integrated across the armed forces. The four areas he organized are electronic health records (EHRs), medical command and control, medical logistics and patient movement and tracking.
Now the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application (AHLTA), the military’s EHR, and the AHLTA family of products, including AHLTA-Mobile (a handheld device for first responders) and AHLTA-Theater, give clinicians the ability to document, retrieve and analyze patient data, whether treatment occurs on the battlefield or the home front. Outpatient records on soldiers in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan are transmitted to AHLTA’s clinical data repository.
As a result, DOD health care providers can access longitudinal health data on any patient, anytime, worldwide.
“Since he began as program manager in October 2005, Col. Hines has been known for meeting major milestones and responding to the needs of wounded warriors with enhancements to the theater systems,” Chuck Campbell, the acting chief information officer for the Military Health System, said in a statement.
“He recently achieved another success by delivering such an enhancement three months earlier than expected,” Campbell added. “With it, we can provide clinicians at the Department of Veterans Affairs viewable access to patients’ battlefield treatment data for both outpatient encounters and inpatient stays.”
This capability, via the Bidirectional Health Information Exchange, was scheduled to go live in December, but an accelerated effort by Hines and his staff resulted in an Oct. 6 launch. VA doctors can retrieve theater clinical data including medications, laboratory and radiology results, allergies and notes on patient encounters for those patients who are treated at VA hospitals and clinics after leaving the service.
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.
