VA, Defense share interoperable health data

For years, observers have criticized the health IT staff at the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs Department for having achieved so little in the way of interconnecting their patient care data. Now, they can fend off at least some of their critics. The two have just completed a pilot under which they exchanged information between their respective clinical information systems.

The pilot was launched March 30 at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital and at VA hospitals with polytrauma capabilities in Minneapolis, Palo Alto, CA, Richmond, VA and Tampa, FL. Messages flowing out of Walter Reed are coming to the VA in a format known as SBAR (situation, background, assessment and recommendation).

The VA and DoD are using the SBAR format on the recommendation of a steering group of about 50 nurses. They felt it was much better than coping with scanned paper records sent via PDF, as the PDFs were unmanageably large. The SBAR allows nurses to move quickly through the information using a template with drop-down menus. At Walter Reed, the records are also populated with patient demographic data from the hospital's Composite Health Care System and its Essentris clinical IT system.

To learn more about this pilot:
- read this Modern Healthcare piece [1] (reg. req.)

Related Articles:
DoD makes progress in VA EMR integration [2]
DOD, VA still struggling to share EMR data [3]
Bureaucracy holds up military EMR deployment [4]
VA EHR project faces DOD opposition [5]