Editor's Note: This story was updated at 11:25 a.m. March 27, 2006, to correct the names of the Battlefield Medical Information System Telemedicine-Joint and TMIP Composite Health Care System II-Theater software.
The Army’s Medical Communications for Combat Casualty Care (MC4) program started last week to deploy 600 battlefield electronic health care systems to medical personnel supporting U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It is the first such deployment there since combat operations started in 2001.
MC4 has fielded about 12,000 laptop and handheld computers to medical personnel in Iraq since operations started there in 2003, an MC4 spokesman said. Lack of funding delayed fielding of MC4 systems to Afghanistan until this year, said Maj. Kevin Watts, MC4 assistant program manager.
A top medical commander said Afghanistan has been the forgotten theater in terms of battlefield electronic health care systems.
Col. Ronald Place, deputy commander of the Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, said in an interview earlier this month that during his 2005 tour in Afghanistan, clinicians had to use paper medical records and send lab tests to Germany.
Watts said the MC4 systems sent to Afghanistan last week will allow medical personnel there to shift their business processes from paper to electronic systems, including electronic health records.
The MC4 spokesman said equipment deployed to Afghanistan consists of handheld computers, laptops and servers, but he could not provide a breakdown by category. The MC4 hardware runs software provided by the Military Health System’s Theater Medical Information Program (TMIP), including Battlefield Medical Information System Telemedicine-Joint (BMIST-J) software installed on Hewlett-Packard iPAQ handheld computers.
BMIST-J, which field medics carry, is preloaded with medical information on soldiers in a particular unit, which allows medics to use a drop-down menu for quick information entry on a soldier under treatment.
The Panasonic Toughbook notebooks fielded by MC4 run the TMIP Composite Health Care System II-Theater software, which provides much of the functionality found in the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application (formerly CHCS-II) system used in Defense Department hospitals worldwide.
