The Defense
Department has met the interoperability requirements for electronic health
records as called for in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2014,
according to DoD officials.
DoD and
Veterans Affairs have two goals in integrating patients' records and making the
information accessible by both agencies, said Chris Miller, the program
executive officer for Defense Healthcare Management Systems.
Those goals, he
said, are to create a seamless health record, and modernize the software that
clinicians and analysts in both agencies use.
"At the
end of the day, I think it comes down to some pretty basic things," Miller
said in a media roundtable at his Arlington, Virginia, office yesterday. "Are
we able to share information and are people able to use that information to
accomplish their job on the other side?"
Integrated View Helps Doctors and
Veterans
By seeing a
patient's combined record, doctors will have a complete picture of the
patient's medical treatment, he said. This will allow the clinicians to make
the best choices for the patient.
It saves
doctors and analysts from having to sort through stacks of copies of files, Miller
said, adding that patients will no longer have to provide hard copies of their
records, which could be hundreds of pages long.
There are
multiple electronic health record systems within DoD, he said. The first steps in
building the integrated system included making sure officials knew where all the
data was, and agreeing to common terms using national standards.
The web-based,
integrated system, called the Joint Legacy Viewer, or JLV, is secure, Miller
said. A user needs government credentials to log in, and the system keeps track
of who accessed a person's record.
The JLV can be
viewed by DoD and VA personnel. Benefit analysts use the information for
disability evaluations.
"That's
an important concept because that really gets at what is important, which is
really having access to the information," Miller noted.
Long-Term Commitment
Interoperability
is a "steadfast commitment on our behalf," he said.
"What we
really want to be able to show is the progress we've made and demonstrate our
commitment to making sure that we're providing tools that are useful for our
providers but also making things better for our service-member veterans and
their families," Miller said.
There is a lot
of information and data, he said. The JLV integrates information from 300 data
sources.
"We've
done a lot to get this information to a point where it's both shared and it's
usable, but we recognize that we're going to continue to have to do more things
to actually continue to make it as useful as possible," Miller said.
JLV is still
in a testing phase, he said.
"This
data does a lot to help people and it also does a lot to improve how our
clinical providers do their job," Miller said.
Demonstrating the Joint Legacy Viewer
During the
media roundtable, Dr. Brian Jones, the Defense Health Agency user integration
branch chief, demonstrated using the JLV.
"The data
the JLV is exposing is actually all the way from when somebody enters the
military, all the way through deployment, and also follows them to the VA,"
he said.
In a letter dated
Nov. 16, Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology
and logistics, said that DoD and VA have partnered closely to meet the 2014
NDAA requirements.
DoD has mapped
all 21 domains requiring national standard terminologies, representing nearly
1.8 million unique clinical terms, Kendall said in the letter to U.S. Representative
Harold Rogers, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
The NDAA
required all data in DoD's Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology
Application outpatient system be shared in compliance with existing national
standards.
Kendall said
the DoD exceeded NDAA requirements by integrating data from other DoD systems,
including inpatient, theater and pharmacy.