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GCN Home > 05/2/05 issue

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By Richard W. Walker, GCN Staff

Col. Jill Phillips champions a Web-based system that helps deliver better care

Col. Jill Phillips has a stone plaque on her desk at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. It reads: “Failure cannot cope with persistence.”

Persistence is a critical aspect of leadership for Phillips, director of Walter Reed’s HealtheForces program.

“We find a vision, and once we know that the vision is right, we stay focused on that vision,” Phillips said. “We don’t get pulled to the left or the right. That’s very important—the focus, the persistence, the passion.”

Phillips, an Army nurse practitioner for nearly three decades, demonstrated those qualities in spearheading HealtheForces, an outcomes-management program that supports patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma or heart disease.

The heart of the program is a Web information system that lets patients and physicians provide input and feedback online, creating a comprehensive electronic medical record.

The system, built on the Air Force’s Integrated Clinical Database platform, provides links for doctors to standards of care known as clinical-practice guidelines and incorporates quality-of-life surveys that patients fill out online.

Online feedback

Patient feedback is a unique and important part of the program. Using the online survey, for example, patients can convey the impact of their health-care needs on their daily lives, giving primary-care and specialty physicians an understanding of how their patients’ quality of life is affected by the disease and treatments.

The ability to organize outcomes data into an easily accessible electronic record is key to the program’s success. The old, paper-based process would have been too slow and cumbersome, Phillips said.

“We’d have to comb through hundreds of paper clinical records to get at the information we get at easily [via the electronic-record system],” she said.

Phillips used—that word again—persistence to overcome some cultural resistance to the shift to an electronic system.

“Standing up an electronic health-care record with surveys is 10 percent technology and 90 percent an education process,” Phillips said. “It’s not without its risk when people are very comfortable with paper. You have to be persistent. You have to be a friendly burr under their saddle.”

Since deployment at Walter Reed, the program has expanded to other military medical centers around the country.

HealtheForces has also attracted the attention of health officials high in the government—David Brailer, national health IT coordinator at the Health and Human Services Department, for one.

More news on related topics: Defense IT, Web Strategies



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