“Key areas in maintaining military readiness go beyond systems and weapons — they include the health of the very service members across all military service branches.”
“’Our soldier, our warfighter, those folks that serve our nation are the most prized weapon system that we have,’ said Col. Deydre Teyhen, simultaneously serving as the Army Medical Command’s deputy chief of staff of the G-1/4/6 and the Army Medical Specialist Corps’ 20th chief. ‘We need our soldiers to be able to see … and make the right decision at the right time. That requires not just smart decisions, but that they’re not physically exhausted, that they have the stamina and resilience to be able to make the right decision at the right time.'”
“Teyhen was speaking Wednesday at the HIMSS conference in Orlando, Florida, on a panel about Defense Department efforts to build a data ecosystem that supports the health of service members. This includes connecting eight different dimensions that DOD sees as critical to optimizing health, performance and readiness holistically.”
“But creating a data ecosystem that can be used in various predictive modeling efforts or even health treatments for the service member to ensure that readiness is still in its infancy.”
“This is because having a 360-degree view of health requires collecting and making use of information obtained in different places that have different levels of reliability and accuracy, noted Capt. Kimberly Elenberg at the conference. Elenberg is aligned to the deputy secretary of defense Enterprise Analytics Support Directorate as the lead strategist for DOD Enterprise Health Analytics and Warrior Performance Lines of Effort.”
“A true holistic and fully functioning data ecosystem, she added, incorporates data from public health surveillance, individual health and also medical intelligence. This means merging data sets that are latent, not entirely accurate and more predictive in nature.”
“This program — Total Force Fitness — aims to collect data from all aspects of health, including spiritual, sleep, activity, nutrition and medical readiness. It’s what Teyhen refers to the effort to build a ‘digital health environment around the soldier…'” Read the full article here.
Source: DOD Wants a Holistic Health Data Ecosystem to Measure Military Readiness – By Amy Kluber, March 16, 2022. GovCIO.
