One of the central priorities of the Department of Defense’s multibillion-dollar Defense Health Management System Modernization (DHMSM) contract awarded last week is a requirement that any new electronic health records management system be interoperable with the one used by the Veterans Affairs Department.
After the two agencies failed to agree on a single health records management system back in 2013, it was determined that the DoD system would work with VA’s Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA).
VA is currently working on the fourth generation of VistA, which isn’t set to be completed until 2018.
Whatever the next version of VistA looks like, officials from VA and DoD are confident the two systems will work together to provide seamless care to soldiers, whether active-duty or retired.
“Interoperability is not a new idea between DoD and VA,” said Sloan Gibson, VA deputy secretary, during a health IT summit sponsored by AFCEA on July 31. Gibson noted the two departments regularly share data over their networks through a number of applications.
Despite that, “We have a massive and comprehensive effort underway between VA and DoD” to ensure the systems are interoperable, he said.
Defense Health Agency CIO David Bowen agreed, stating that VA and DoD share data daily on procedures, check-ups, benefits and more.
“We are 100 percent committed to being interoperable with the VA,” Bowen said. “We’ve defined what that means, we have managed our systems so that where we are basically speaking a different language we have developed standards to translate data back and forth.”
Some of that standardization has been accomplished by using middleman software to translate between systems, though officials on both sides would like to see the same standard reporting language used at both departments.
“The biggest one for me is semantic interoperability,” said Mark Goodge, DHA CTO. “Look at normalized health languages that allow us, not only to operate here, but in a global situation.”
Goodge suggested this can be accomplished by helping create, then adhering to international standards on how doctors report health data. If both DoD and VA use such standards, much of the interoperability question would take care of itself.
“I think the bigger challenge is interoperability with everybody else,” Gibson said, referring to data generated at general hospitals or personal physicians.
VA is working on that problem, most notably with its electronic health management platform (e-HMP), which began pilot tests this summer.
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