The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments are still lagging in their attempts to electronically exchange patient health information with one another, and they’ll have to bolster their efforts if they want to overcome the obstacles that have hindered them in the past, the Government Accountability Office said in an April 30 report.
The report cited two problems — patient identifiers that don’t match, and VA patients who were released from active duty before 1997 and who may not have an identification number. The agencies said those problems have prevented them from successfully sharing patient health information, particularly outpatient pharmacy data.
Seamless exchange of data between DOD and VA is critical, according to the report, because they have a significant number of shared patients who receive care from both agencies and electronic information from those patients can provide clinicians with the complete record they need for decision-making and preventing medication errors.
GAO noted that the two agencies have taken steps to exchange computable outpatient pharmacy data since their collaborative initiative began in March 2004. DOD and VA have combined their data repositories into one Clinical Data/Health Data Repository, and they have started exchanging patient data using this newly created interface at seven locations as of March 2007 including Eisenhower Army Medical Center and Augusta VA Medical Center.
The DOD said all 117 of its sites will be able to exchange information on shared patients by the end of June 2007, while VA said its 128 sites will be able to activate shared patient data by mid-September 2007. But those goals could prove unattainable if the agencies don’t increase their momentum and make the data sharing project a high priority, especially given past delays, the report states.
“Until DOD and VA take additional steps to ensure all shared patients benefit from the exchange of computable pharmacy data, many shared patients will not receive the benefit of more complete automatic electronic checks for adverse medication reactions,” GAO said.
The report recommended the two agencies expeditiously develop a solution for sharing information when patient identifiers don’t match, decide on written guidelines for defining and identifying shared patients, and speed up efforts to assign DOD identification numbers to VA patients discharged from active duty before 1997.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
