Friday, May 17, 2024

FedHealthIT 2020 Innovation Award Winners – Defense Health Agency

Click the image to view the speeches. Program descriptions are below.

Agile Core Services Data Access Layer / Enterprise Intelligence and Data Solutions
Defense Health Agency
The ever-increasing diversity and volume of data pose significant challenges to the Defense Health Agency (DHA) as the primary steward of the MHS. The primary objective of ACS DAL was to improve data integration across sources from within the Department of Defense (DoD) and from community Healthcare providers leading to the empowerment of providers and ultimately more intelligent Healthcare for the Warfighter and their families. As a result of automated delivery of data science tooling (or Data Science-as-a-Service), DHA data scientists now have the tools and resources at-the-ready so they can focus their time on building intelligent applications and conducting analytics rather than standing up the infrastructure.

Navy Care Virtual Health Program 
Naval Hospital Jacksonville
Navy Care, powered by AmWell, was selected as Naval Hospital Jacksonville’s Virtual Health platform. Navy Care serves as a secure, robust telehealth solution, allowing providers from multiple practice areas to conduct scheduled, HIPAA-compliant video visits with patients. The most innovative aspect of Navy Care is the ease with which patients access, and providers deliver quality healthcare in the digital space. Insights from the program will inform how a scalable digital health capability can support the mission and objectives of the Defense Health Agency. Since January 2018, NH Jacksonville has enrolled more than 100 providers, over 300 care team members, 6,400 patients and conducted more than 3,000 virtual visits.

Addressing Provider Alert Fatigue at the MHS 
Defense Health Agency
Advancement in Electronic Health Records introduced drug-drug, drug-allergy verifications before prescribing and dispensing medications to patients. Numerous studies uncovered provider alert fatigue from overexposure to alerts. To analyze over 2.4 million alerts triggered in 30 days, Guidehouse developed data visualization tools to create a tailored dashboard of alert metrics for the MHS, which monitors month-over-month medical alert trends. The dashboard allows decision-makers to quickly identify outliers and trends that may not otherwise be apparent. The analysis serves as a vital resource for leaders to make data-driven decisions by identifying not just which drug-drug, drug-allergy interactions to suppress, but also the downstream effects a suppression will have on the alerts providers receive.

DoD Healthcare Management System Modernization (DHMSM)
Defense Health Agency

DHMSM established a program-wide Data Analytics Cell to automate data collection and correlation to provide data visualizations, prompting sound and informed decision making. The program overhauled training materials and delivery to support rapid, effective learning and adoption. MHS GENESIS was deployed in September 2019 to its first Wave and was deemed a significant success. MHS GENESIS does more than address the problem. By analyzing the data in one system, the program provides accurate, latent, and comprehensive information about patients at the point of care, and helps providers effectively diagnose patients, reduce medical errors, and provide safer care with improved interoperability.

DHA Marketplace Technology Integration Office – Cyber Operations Support 
Defense Health Agency
The Defense Health Agency (DHA) is overhauling the Military Treatment Facilities (MTF) into one DHA enterprise. The dispersal of resources to market regions allows the Marketplace Cyber team more coverage over a broader area enabling rapid process development targeting customer needs. In total, the team has accelerated work on 165 cyber authorizations. Moreover, through streamlined business processes, the team is capturing risk data for 40 sites on the DHA network in real-time. The team eases cyber constraints at the treatment facilities allowing onsite staff to focus support on the local healthcare needs and has proven useful in strategy development based on the ability to rapidly disperse messages and collect data, enabling Enterprise support.

NCR Medical Device System Security and Integration
Defense Health Agency National Capital Region Market
The NCR team engineered a new approach to the problem of securing medical device connectivity. The Medical Device Gateway (MDG) considerably simplifies the interface and interoperability of medical devices with the EHR while substantially improving the security posture of local and enterprise medical networks. The MDG enables the establishment of a medical device ecosystem that strengthens operations, safety, cybersecurity, and economic savings for the region’s extensive healthcare system. As the solution goes live, initiatives such as telehealth gain new supporting technology. The team’s work simplifying secure medical device integration could be the most transformative technology since digitized medical device data.

Forward Operating Base Expert Telemedicine Resource Utilizing Mobile Application for Trauma (FOXTROT) 
Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center
The US Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC) Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) partnered with US Air Force 59th Medical Wing to develop a secure mobile application to treat ocular trauma in remote deployed locations. This project intends to develop and test an operationally secure, HIPAA compliant application to treat combat-related eye trauma injuries. Secure, convenient, and interactive, it provides a streamlined personalized interface. The triage survey feature provides tele-mentoring to correctly perform a basic ophthalmic examination and photograph the eye. The consultation feature of FOXTROT directs users to collect relevant information to generate a consult. The provider at the point of injury routes consultations according to patient’s acuity.

Proactive Data Quality Reconciliation and Tier 2.5 Helpdesk Support
Defense Health Agency

The DHA repurposed the Tier 2.5 Team to identify and fix patient identity issues before they impact users. Implementing a new, proactive, and automated enterprise-wide approach, the team leveraged IT to automatically identify and fix issues as they occur. As of January 2020, the DHA Tier 2.5 team proactively remediated 2,028,178 AHLTA and CHCS patient identity issues, cleaning all of the active patient population, eliminating $194 million in future Service Desk costs and reduced incoming tickets by 98%. In collaboration with the RPCs, the team resolved identified data issues preventing the delay and/or denial of benefits for thousands of servicemembers.

Narcotics Ordering Review and Approval 
Defense Health Agency
NORA is a web-based application automating the ordering process for Schedule II controlled substances. NORA brings the Military Health System into alignment with industry best practices and civilian healthcare organizations that utilize the DEA’s Controlled Substance Ordering System (CSOS). Over the past three years JMLFDC has on-boarded more than 300 approved NORA users and executed more than 19,000 purchase orders. Approval and delivery times for continental U.S. (CONUS) customers dropped from 4 days to less than a day, while approval and submittal processing dropped from 7 days to 1 day for those outside the continental U.S. (OCONUS). Since the adoption in 2016, DoD expenditures for controlled substances dropped to $61.6 million due to less on-hand inventory.

See the video and read about the winners from the Department of Veterans Affairs here.

See the video and read about the winners from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services here.

See the video and read about the winners from the Department of Health and Human Services here.

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Heather Seftel-Kirk
Heather Seftel-Kirk
A writer for more than a decade, Heather helps hone the voice of FedHealthIT, helping to shape the information we share, working with collaborators and stakeholders to ensure they are delivering the message they intend and that it is the information our readers want to hear. A firm believer that every person has a story to tell and that every story is worth sharing, if told right, she also believes the written word carries power – to inform, to educate, and also to bring people together.

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