Government medical care providers should be able to retrieve useful treatment analytics from clinical data repositories, the better to assess the health care to the populations they serve.
That was the trend identified at a knowledge management workshop conducted at a forum on the Defense Health Information System sponsored by Georgetown University in Washington last week.
The theme was that health care providers ought to have a return on their efforts for entering data into government health care records.
“We ought to be providing feedback to clinicians in order to prove to them the value of entering the data and how it relates to their panel of patients,” said Jack Bates, program manager for the Veterans Health Administration corporate data warehouse.
“We need to make sure that both systems have the ability to do outcomes research,” he added, referring the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments' health information technology systems.
The workshop discussed knowledge management trends in Defense health IT during next five to 10 years. “The common thread is the need to get at the data,” said Bates.
Making use of the vast volumes data in the DOD and VA systems will involve “instituting a culture of analytics,” he said.
That culture will yield tools to help clinicians at the point of care in addition to providing researchers and policymakers with information at the health population or demographic level.
“We will be providing clinicians with actionable knowledge on the spot,” Bates said.
At a more granular level, Bates predicted that the DOD and VA health IT systems will be bringing image data to the clinical knowledge space. “It’s going to be 10 years before we figure out how to leverage that kind of knowledge and how to make it discoverable.
“That is a good topic for DOD and VA to collaborate on,” he added. “Why should they try to solve it separately?”
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.
