VA, DoD to Test Initial Joint E-health Record in July

Defense and Veterans Affairs department officials will meet June 23 to approve a major step in a four-to-six year marathon to have a joint electronic health record.

Secretaries Robert Gates and Eric Shinseki, of DoD and VA respectively, will review the plans to implement the initial part of the EHR at a joint medical facility in Chicago.

VA and DoD co-developed a new graphical user interface (GUI) that will bring together data from both agency's systems.

"We took six VA clinicians, six DoD clinicians and we put them in a room with a blank piece of paper and asked them what a good GUI looks like," said Peter Levin, VA's chief technology officer in an interview after a recent conference. "No one had asked them that before. There was one criteria that qualified anybody to be in the room, I wasn't allowed to have heard of them before. I wanted people who normally wouldn't participate in the process to sit down in this very user centric way, with a trained facilitator, a guy who has designed hundreds of user interfaces in the past. And we drew it out on a white board. We have now demonstrated to the secretary a prototype implementation, a live implementation, with all the consents, all the privacy, all the security, it was all there."