“Amid a focus on adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic and building out its emergency care network to care for a new influx of patients, the Department of Veterans Affairs is also looking on leveraging its technical capacities to improve care deliveries and outcomes in ways that will both aid the current public health crisis and persist after its resolution.”
“Speaking at the FedHealth IT Delivering a Human-Centered Design webinar, Veterans Affairs API developers discussed the measures they are taking to both build out the agency’s API capacities and apply them to newfound fields.”
“Discussing recent steps in data management, VA Director of Product Strategy Jason Glanville outlined how API development has helped safeguard data privacy while allowing developer partners to access the agency’s health information database. This has been a particularly notable project considering both the VA’s wealth of health data, as well as the necessary sensitivity required in handling patient information.”
“’We’ve made significant strides over the past year to aggregate this data through a trusted portal in a standard format so our veterans can then connect to these innovative solutions with their explicit consent,’ he said. ‘What that means is that even if a developer partner is connected to the VA, they will only see the health information for the specific veteran from whom they’ve received explicit consent.’”
“Dave Mazik, lead developer behind the VA’s Lighthouse API program, emphasized the foundational importance of ensuring patient privacy and consent as the first step of broader data exchange…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA Redefining Health Care Delivery Amid COVID-19 Epidemic – By Adam Patterson, June 26, 2020. GovernmentCIO.
