“The departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense joint electronic health records modernization (EHRM) initiative has shown considerable promise for widely improving the delivery of health care and allowing clinicians to provide more effective lifelong treatment to patients.”
“Speaking at the 2021 ACT-IAC Health Innovation Summit, representatives from VA and Defense Health Agency Federal Electronic Health Records Modernization Office (FEHRM) discussed how this ongoing consolidation process has paid off for caregivers and practitioners across both DOD and VA.”
“One of the primary benefits of this consolidated EHRM push has been the facilitation of data sharing and access for health care research, an outcome that has bolstered the considerable scope of initiatives ongoing across both VA and DOD.”
“’One of the benefits is actually having real data that doesn’t have to constantly be moved and modified. If anyone’s done research before, once you’ve touched the data you potentially break all the research that was done on that data, so you have to be very careful to keep it all normalized,’ said John Short, chief technology and integration officer at the VA Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization.”
“‘Actually having one system where all the data was measured the exact same way, recorded in the same way, stored in the same way, allows the researcher to have more pristine data. Having that actual data all recorded in the same manner allows researchers to have better value based outcomes, and to be able to actually say for sure, without any doubt, that the outcome they derived and analyzed is 100% accurate, as opposed to having variable errors pop in when you have to move data around and change it.'”
“The ongoing investment in consolidating health records and medical information has also shown promise for improving the delivery of care, especially as a continuous process from enlistment to retirement age for America’s service members…” Read the full article here.
Source: Electronic Health Records Modernization Improving Federal Health Care Delivery – By Adam Patterson, June 10, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
