Two Government Organizations, One Health Information System

Common data standards will enable shared medical data to follow troops and dependents.

The U.S. Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs have launched an effort to combine their two electronic health record systems into one. This integrated Electronic Health Record will track medical care from the day military members join the service through the rest of their lives. The project will not be a simple joining of two legacy systems; rather, it will upgrade current tools, with personnel continually integrating new technology, capability and processes to improve functionality of the combined offering.

“We really are changing the way we do business,” Beth McGrath, deputy chief management officer for the Defense Department, says. Her office leads the integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR) hand-in-hand with the Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Information and Technology. The organizations have established an integrated program office with dedicated personnel from their respective staffs to direct the effort.

Work started on the new system last summer, but because of the plan to add improvements whenever possible, leaders do not identify an end date. Roger Baker, VA assistant secretary for information and technology and chief information officer, explains that, “In an ideal world, [users] will wake up one day and find out that we have snuck it in on them. All of a sudden it’s become a single electronic health record system, and they never really notice that we did it.”...