Senior leaders at the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs hailed plans announced last week by both departments to jointly develop an inpatient electronic health record.
The plans, announced in speeches at the annual Military Health System (MHS) conference in Washington, D.C., provided few details except to forecast considerable savings from a joint effort.
Dr. William Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs, told MHS conference attendees that he considered development of a joint EHR a groundbreaking move that will enable the two departments to develop systems that will care for patients from the battlefield throughout the continuum of care DOD and VA health systems provide.
VA Secretary James Nicholson said the decision will transform both departments’ health care systems and position them to lead the country in developing standards-based EHRs. Development of a joint inpatient EHR makes sense because both organizations are responsible for providing health care for the same group of people at different stages of their lives. DOD provides health care while service personnel are on active duty and the VA does once those people leave active service, he added.
The departments have built and operate different outpatient EHRs, and last year both houses of Congress pushed DOD and the VA to use the same EHR, a move that met with strong objections from top DOD health officials. Despite the objections, Winkenwerder said the decision to jointly develop an inpatient EHR was not the result of outside influence. “It came from people inside” the departments, he said.
Winkenwerder said at an MHS media briefing that he believes development of a joint DOD/VA EHR will save a considerable amount of money, but he said he could not quantify the savings at this time. The first step toward joint development has already started with a requirements study that will last 60 to 90 days and will help both departments focus on efforts needed to bring about the joint inpatient EHR, Winkenwerder added.
The requirements of an inpatient EHR in both departments are similar, he said, with an overlap of 80 percent to 90 percent, and the remainder areas of care unique to either DOD or the VA. He agreed with Nicholson that this joint effort can blaze the way in setting standards for interoperability for nonfederal health care systems.
Government Health IT presents Rick Friedman, director of the division of state systems for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in this recent eSeminar regarding how the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services is partnering with state Medicaid and health and human services officials to bring Medicaid into the digital age. Paul McCloskey, Government Health IT editor, moderates.
