“The Department of Defense is moving forward with its plans to integrate and optimize all Military Health System components after pausing to focus on national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Tom McCaffery announced Dec. 8 in remarks to the annual meeting of AMSUS, the Society of Federal Health Professionals.”
“’An important lesson learned as a result of the pandemic is that marshalling the Department’s vast medical assets to quickly respond to a requirement on the scale of a pandemic is challenging when those assets are separately managed by four distinct entities,’ McCaffery told the military and federal medical professionals who attended the virtual meeting…”
“Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the MHS had embarked on reforms and initiatives to improve its medical support to the armed services.
“Those reforms were intended to ‘develop a long-term strategic framework to help all MHS components to better coordinate and integrate their efforts and our shared mission of ensuring a ready medical force,’ McCaffery said, but the pandemic forced a pause in several reform initiatives to ensure the MHS could properly focus on supporting the DOD and all government pandemic responses.”
“The MHS leadership team has resumed this effort to develop this long-term strategy, he noted. In November, the secretary ‘lifted the pause on activities supporting the transition of the management of all [Medical Treatment Facilities] MTFs from the services to the DHA and directed resumption of the department’s implementation plan to complete the transition by Sept. 30, 2021,’ McCaffery said.”
“’The pandemic experience has underscored the need for a consolidated enterprise management of our health care system. Managing the department’s critical medical assets, under an enterprise framework, allows the health system to more effectively support the military departments’ man, train, and equip responsibilities that support a ready medical force,’ he explained.”
“Having the private sector care under the TRICARE Health Plan and the DoD’s more than 700 military hospitals and clinics ‘under one joint agency will allow us to have standardized health care delivery policies and business practices across the entire military health system,’ McCaffery said, ‘and that will go a long way to reducing undesirable variation for both providers and patients and improve our beneficiaries’ experience.’”
“The primary driver for this change is the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017…” Read the full article here.
Source: Pandemic underscores MHS’ need for reform, McCaffery tells AMSUS – December 8, 2020. Military Health System.
