“Government health services are evolving to provide a continuum of care, which means agencies such as the Veterans Health Administration and Defense Health Agency are rethinking how to deliver a broader range of capabilities. New tools and electronic health record systems promise to improve access to services, speed and quality of care for active-duty warfighters and veterans, but those advances depend on a core IT foundation that must be updated at the same pace as clinical technologies. To ensure that those new patient- and provider-facing capabilities can fulfill their potential, agencies must modernize those back-end platforms, which presents significant challenges as many core systems are built on embedded legacy components.”
“Bridging this gap can eliminate cost duplication and data sharing issues through IT consolidation and standardization across the military health care ecosystem. Yet it’s equally critical to empower patient-facing treatment facilities with the flexibility and innovation required to serve their unique patient populations most effectively. Perhaps most importantly, changes and upgrades should map to the end user’s journey; that is, ensuring every step provides an easier, smarter, more effective experience, all leading to improved patient outcomes.”
Three Essential Stages to Health IT Transformation
“The path to coordinating improvements for both clinical and core IT can be viewed as three, interdependent phases:
- Rationalization
- Accountability
- Performance”
“Each stage offers opportunities for transformative thinking: new approaches to the processes, platforms and skill sets that will drive better outcomes and greater flexibility down the road…” Read the full article here.
Source: Health Modernization: Core IT Must Keep Up with Clinical Innovation — By Diana Ceban, April 26, 2021. Nextgov.
