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VA AND DoD OPEN A NEW MEDICAL DATA SPIGOT --
The VA and DoD have opened data connections
that
allow doctors in either department to view
patient
records created by their colleagues at the
other agency.
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Story here...
http://govhealthit.
com/article103423-08-03-07-Web
Story below:
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DOD and VA open a new medical data spigot
BY Nancy Ferris
The departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs opened data connections
this week that allow doctors in either department to view patient
records created by their colleagues at the other agency.
Military Health System officials hailed the new interface as a sign of
tremendous progress in the campaign to share data between the
departments, which have many patients in common.
With the latest development in the Bidirectional Health Information
Exchange (BHIE) program, doctors can now click a button on their
computer screens -- whether they are using DOD’s Armed Forces Health
Longitudinal Technology Application or VA’s Veterans Health Information
Systems and Technology Architecture –- and see medication and allergy
profiles, and laboratory, radiology and pathology reports, said Charles
Hume, deputy chief information officer at the Military Health System.
More types of patient information -- such as problem lists, vital signs,
diagnostic images and family history -- will become available in future
BHIE releases, according to Military Health System officials.
BHIE was available at some hospitals previously, but now all 135
military hospitals and 155 VA medical centers have access to it.
Response time for queries is measured in seconds. “It’s essentially
instantaneous,” Hume said.
Although doctors at both agencies use the same process to access
records, the two systems handle queries differently. The Military Health
System’s Clinical Data Repository holds all service members’ records,
and VA’s queries go directly to the database. VA is building a Health
Data Repository, but in the meantime, DOD queries are sent to VA
hospitals nationwide, Hume said.
Until now, doctors had to log onto a separate system to view the records
rather than accessing them with the same software they use for their own
clinical records.
In the future, BHIE will go beyond allowing doctors to view the records
to facilitating the exchange of data across system boundaries. The
program to build the more robust interface is called the Clinical Data
Repository/Health Data Repository (CHDR).
Seven DOD and VA hospitals are already using CHDR to automatically check
for potentially harmful drug interactions whenever a doctor writes an
electronic prescription.
By the end of the year, Hume said, the feature that checks for adverse
drug interactions should be installed at all of the agencies’ 290
hospitals. He said he knows of no other system that performs checks so
widely when a prescription is written.
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Larry Scott --
