By Aliya Sternstein, National Journal's Technology Daily
At the third hearing on the topic this year, lawmakers on Wednesday struggled to understand why the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs continue to have problems electronically sharing information necessary to treat service members and veterans.
"I hope and I expect that DOD and VA will tell us today that, by no more than a year from now, clinicians in DOD and VA will have full electronic access to the medical information they need to treat their patients, whether that information resides in computers owned by DOD or by VA," Arizona Democrat Harry Mitchell, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, said at a hearing.
According to findings released at the hearing by the Government Accountability Office, the departments have ad hoc processes in place if there is an immediate need to provide data on severely wounded service members to VA centers that specialize in treating such patients. The manual workarounds, like scanning paper records, are generally feasible only because the number of such patients is small.
Full story: http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=38372&dcn=e_gvet
