The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments are not exchanging information as well as they could be, at least according to comments received by a Military Health System Web chat on wounded warrior care.
MHS conducted its first-ever “Web hall” Feb. 14, in which participants posted questions and comments on a message board on the MHS Web site and several military medical officials responded.
One participant complained that DOD “has hundreds of millions of dollars to fix all the problems that injured military guys and their families face getting health care from the private sector as well as moving between the military and the VA."
“What is being done with all that money and why haven't we seen problems fixed?” she asked.
Another Web chatter wrote that his brother suffered a traumatic brain injury and lapsed into a coma a year ago.
He complained that he is “not seeing the funding at the tactical level."
“The Army and VA in general seem to want to help, but we're unsure why the details are dropped early, often and nearly all the time,” he added. “The issue is always something different, and it usually has to do with communication.”
Presumably, those problems could be solved if DOD’s medial records were available VA’s systems. The two departments have made strides in making some, but not all data, mutually available.
In response to these comments Dr. S. Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs, wrote that among other initiatives, the Army's warrior transition units “now surround our wounded warriors with medical, nursing, and bureaucracy help."
“We are also working closely with VA in improving the disability evaluation process, and upgrading our electronic health records to make them more useful, private, portable, and patient-controlled," he wrote.
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.
