A gap between the availability of military health technologies and the knowledge and use of those tools by clinicians emerged at a meeting of the Defense Health Board in April.
Military health information technology issues were discussed in several contexts at the two-day conference in Tacoma, Wash.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kelley, Joint Staff surgeon, reported that many health care practitioners are unaware that the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments share clinical information.
Providers in the Washington, D.C., area are more likely to be aware of the existence of bidirectional information sharing “because it's a big thing,” Kelley said. “If you're working out in the hinterlands, you may not realize that you have access to quite a bit of the clinical data. So there's an education piece in there.”
He added that sharing information about disabilities is still lacking because DOD’s system in that area is primarily paper-based.
The knowledge gap also came up in a discussion of the Military Vaccine Agency. Col. Randall Anderson, the agency’s director, explained why it subsists on four stateside Vaccine Healthcare Centers and no overseas centers.
“I think with e-mail and tele-consulting and all the other tools that are used, they can provide their services internationally as long as you've got the people in the field who know that their services are available,” Anderson said, “and that's where the bigger challenge is.”
A different sort of IT issue came up with regard to a study by the board’s Military Occupational/Environmental Health and Medical Surveillance Subcommittee on false high readings in an environmental risk assessment conducted by DOD at Balad Air Base in Iraq.
Dr. William Halperin, chairman of the subcommittee, said environmental toxins had been reported in the wrong units.
“Information by itself is only part of the deal,” he said. “We have lots of information technology, we just don't have any information. A lot of thinking about how errors occur is a matter of thinking about…what's coming through the systems.”
Government Health IT presents Liesa Jo Jenkins, executive director of CareSpark, in this recent eSeminar, where she shared her experiences and insight into building a health information exchange that enhances community health, rewards regional collaboration and drives economic progress.
