Today, the health history of a military beneficiary is stored in AHLTA www.health.mil, an electronic medical records system used by DOD medical providers with the veteran’s health history stored in VistA www.ehealth.va.gov/VistA.asp. The data in the systems is not interoperable so when service members are discharged from active duty, their health history is not available in VistA, which greatly inhibits continuity of case as service members’ transition to veteran status.
In FY 12 and FY13, TATRC’s Health Technology Innovation Center (HTIC) demonstrated that RESTful Health Exchange (RHEx) could be used to send secure Direct email allowing the Military Health System (MHS) and private third-party providers to share patient health data securely over the internet.
This year, the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center’s (TATRC) www.tatrc.org HTIC team used RHEx to send information via the Federal Health Information Exchange (HIE). This approach uses a unifying language called Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) combined with RHEx to seamlessly integrate health information from multiple federal agencies such as VA and DOD. Now, the VA and private providers are able to query the Federal HIE by accessing AHLTA and VistA data sources.
The goal of this effort is to document the lessons learned and to provide a way forward for the requirements and architecture of the integrated EHR (iEHR). This will enable the DOD Healthcare Management System Modernization (DHMSM) and the Defense Medical Information Exchange (DMIX) programs to provide solutions to other federal agencies for health information exchange.
While DOD is implementing the new health information exchange via the EHR modernization program, the DMIX program will provide technical solutions allowing DOD to increase the level of data shared with the VA and the private sector.