“To streamline care for the nation’s veterans, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has launched VDIF EP (Veterans Data Integration and Federation Enterprise Platform) to produce a longitudinal patient record by aggregating and normalizing clinical data across its existing electronic medical record systems, enabling interoperability. This has been a goal of VA for more than a decade because a longitudinal patient record enables clinicians to immediately use veterans’ clinical data from both VA and external providers, directly improving care for our nation’s veterans.”
“Based on InterSystems HealthShare®, VDIF aggregates and normalizes data from 130 different electronic medical record instances supporting 172 VA medical centers and 1,074 outpatient clinics. With VDIF, veterans’ longitudinal patient records are available to providers within Veterans Health Administration (VHA) as well as to external providers delivering care to Veterans. The latest version of HealthShare is built upon InterSystems IRIS for Health, the world’s first and only data platform specifically engineered to extract value from healthcare data.”
“A longitudinal patient record also enables veterans to take their entire care history with them when they seek care outside the Veterans Health Administration system – at a private hospital, for example. This is a realization of the 2018 MISSION Act, a law that streamlines veterans’ access to healthcare from outside providers.”
“The VDIF project was led by the VA Office of Information Technology (OIT), in conjunction with the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) together with Cambridge, Mass.-based InterSystems Corporation, with implementation by Ready Computing. VA now plans to connect dozens of clinical applications to VDIF…” Read the full press release here.
Source: VA Makes Interoperability Advancements to Improve Care for Veterans – July 8, 2020. InterSystems.
