The Defense Department has started laying the groundwork to make data in its existing health information systems interoperable with the agency’s future electronic health records infrastructure, Federal News Radio reported Thursday.Jared Serbu writes the agency plans to acquire a commercial EHR platform by next summer with the goal of boosting data interoperability between the DoD and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Mary Ann Rockey, DoD deputy program executive officer for healthcare management systems modernization, said the Defense Management Information Exchange office has been working to standardize older data elements of the military health system.
“By the end of this year, we’ll have millions of those data elements mapped to the standards so that we’ll be able to use that data more effectively,” Rockey was quoted as telling audiences at a recent health IT forum.
“And in the future, when we get the new health record, which will have robust data exchange, that mechanism is then going to point at our legacy data stores, and that will be the way that we get the predominant amount of our legacy information so that we can marry it all together with the new information in our new EHR,” she added.
Serbu reports DMIX is responsible for developing tools to facilitate DoD-VA medical information exchange and for integrating data from private health providers within the Tricare network.
