Defense-VA Integrated Electronic Health Record Could Use Commercial Cloud

The technical blueprint for the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments integrated electronic health record makes the security and privacy of patient information the first priority of the joint system planned for deployment in 2017, backed by rigid clinician access control systems and secure patient identity systems.

But the May 30 draft of the iEHR technical specifications package that Nextgov obtained also shows Defense and VA plan to use commercial cloud computing services as part of the iEHR data infrastructure.

While VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker said in January that the department would use data centers operated by the Defense Information Systems Agency to store veterans’ health records, the draft technical blueprint said the iEHR will include public cloud storage such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and commercial cloud services from AT&T, along with private cloud storage from DISA. Data centers operated by military treatment facilities also stand as another portion of the planned iEHR data infrastructure...