The majority of vision care documentation in the Department of Defense www.health.mil and the Veteran’s Administration www.va.gov consists of hand written notes that are scanned into the clinical information system.
Currently, there is no effective method for electronically documenting, integrating, aggregating, and optimizing the complex vision care data obtained from the wide variety of vision care professionals working in the theater, DOD, and at VA facilities.
Existing applications are not compatible with current vision care workflow demands, vision care data element requirements, application interoperability requirements, and user interface requirements.
The “Optimal Vision Care Prototype (OVCP) project managed by DOD’s Pacific Joint Information Technology Center (PJITC) www.health.mil/PJITC is researching on how to address these shortfalls to enable the seamless availability of comprehensive vision care data across the DOD and VA medical records and registries.
The specific OVCP goals are to:
- Develop requirements that will help develop future vision care systems for the DOD and VA
- Develop standards-based clinical workflows for vision care
- Identify input and output data requirements for each vision care clinical setting
- Create ontologies to map vision care data elements to standard terminologies
- Allow seamless integration with DOD and VA medical records to include CHCS, ALHTA, and VistA as well as legacy or future DOD and VA systems
- Identify vision care capabilities that are addressed by vision care EHR systems in the marketplace