LAS VEGAS – In a session so crowded that conference officials closed the doors and effectively locked attendees out, Military Health System acting CIO Karen Guice, MD, offered a glimpse of the future of MHS health IT.
“The MHS likes to foster innovation, things that improve patient care,” said Guice, who is also the principal deputy assistant, Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. Citing examples, Guice pointed to Blue Button, Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER), the Joint Theater Trauma Registry, and the joint iEHR between the VA and the DoD as innovations that have bolstered health for military service people and may light the way for private healthcare providers, much the way that the practice of triage, now in every ER, initiated in theater.
“We are a global enterprise, unlike many private sector plans,” Guice said. “We’re on ships and airplanes.” That worldwide reach makes it challenging to move health information around securely, but the military has made great strides, she added.
In World War II, for instance, it took 60 days to get an injured patient from theater back to the U.S. for care. “Now we can do that in three days,” Guice said.
Looking ahead, Guice explained that MHS is working toward its “quadruple aim,” which builds on the triple-aim – patient-centered care at lower cost that improves population health – to establish “readiness,” as in being prepared to support troops anytime, anywhere they have to go into battle. Which is where the aforementioned initiatives, as well as the patient-centered medical homes (PCMH) that the DoD and VA are establishing.
As the MHS moves toward VLER and the joint iEHR, Guice said, “we’re changing the framework, making a new architecture, we’re changing everything.”
So MHS instituted 6 guiding principles, for all its health IT projects: opting for a joint project with the VA whenever applicable, taking an adopt, buy, but only create if they have to methodology, establishing transparent management, ensuring each step is driven by strategy, speed to market, and enabling requirements to drive solutions decisions.
In the joint iEHR, for instance, those principles mean that MHS and VA are trying to use as many common architecture elements as possible, turning to open source, and aiming to be transparent about the decisions they make.
“We want to accelerate innovation,” Guice said. “If we can’t solve the problem today, maybe there’s something that can solve it tomorrow.”
