Government Computer News
Defense portal to add medical data-sharing
Consistent e-health records expected to improve care
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Image: Courtesy of DEFENSELINK Spc. Brandi Marshall, U.S. Army
RESCUE: U.S. Army medics load a wounded Iraqi man into a medical helicopter at Forward Operating Base Danger, Iraq.
That might seem an ordinary bit of record-keeping, but the realities of war have made it difficult; during the first Gulf War in 1991, the management of military health care records was inconsistent.
When moving from deployment to deployment, soldiers carried two-inch-thick folders of paper medical records. Information on surgeries performed and vaccines or drugs given on the battlefield was often missing.
As a result, when soldiers were diagnosed with Gulf War syndrome, good-quality data wasn’t available to link drugs with the symptoms, said Edward Clayson, an Army medical communications expert. Because of missing data, many soldiers underwent repetitive and unnecessary procedures, while others, with no documentation to back up their claims, were denied benefits for service-related injuries.
In response to these problems, a presidential advisory commission in 1997 called for the creation of lifelong electronic medical records for military-service members. Congress later passed legislation requiring the Defense Department to create and maintain electronic medical records.
The Army responded with the Medical Communications for Combat Casualty Care program. Clayson is project manager of this information management system for Army tactical medical forces, which uses electronic records for all service members and provides medical data to operational commanders.
“We’re capturing all the health care that’s being done on the battlefield,” Clayson said. Nearly 250,000 medical encounters have been entered into the database and are available to physicians worldwide, he said.
The combat casualty care program is one of several using IT to move DOD toward network-centric operations and warfare. Together with other recent IT programs and system deployments, it is an effort to cut down on duplicative records and processing, consolidate systems and share information agencywide.
Although the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Information Systems Agency use multiple medical systems, intranet portals and databases, DOD wants a single entry point for information for soldiers and commanders. The goal is to create the Defense Knowledge Online portal, a departmentwide, integrated, data-sharing environment.
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