The Secretaries of Veterans Affairs https://www.va.gov and the Department of Defense https://www.defense.gov are required to develop and publish a joint strategic vision statement and a joint strategic plan to shape, focus, and prioritize the coordination and sharing efforts among the two agencies. The Joint Executive Committee recently released the Joint Strategic Plan (JSP).
The VA-DOD Joint Strategic Plan’s (JSP) FY 2019-2021 joint goals are to provide a patient-centered healthcare system to deliver excellent quality, access, satisfaction, and value consistently across the two departments.
The objective is to develop and provide individual, longitudinal exposure-related data and medical information to inform and improve healthcare in terms of diagnosis, treatment, epidemiology, research, handling VA claims, and to improve the disability process.
As for interoperability, the Departments will pursue EHR Modernization Interoperability to enhance health data interoperability between the VA, DOD, and private partners as the VA and DOD continue their EHR modernization.
The Departments are striving to electronically transfer Integrated Disability Evaluation System (IDES) case files plus transfer transactional data. This will help improve IDES program management, oversight, and efficiency by eliminating the requirement for manual file uploads/downloads, reduce data latency, and improve data accuracy by incorporating current manual updates into the Veterans Tracking Application.
The goal is to provide engineering and architecture support in terms of transport/network, identify and access cybersecurity, and produce the data to facilitate a shared EHR infrastructure environment. This shared EHR environment needs to be used by healthcare providers at DOD in their Military Treatment Facilities (MTF), at VA Medical Centers, by patients, and by authorized third parties. Another goal is provide joint data identify services to support VA and DOD EHR modernization with a single VA-DOD Identify Management System Solution.
Telehealth is also mentioned. The VA-DOD Virtual Health Workgroup is going to focus on common virtual health/telehealth workflow capabilities to present what is needed to the company (Cerner) selected for EHRM.
For the report, go to https://prhome.defense.gov click on documents at the top of the page and go to VA/DOD Joint Strategic Plan FY 2019-2021.