BY BOB BREWIN
The Army should adopt the combat medicine practices used in Afghanistan and Iraq and shift its medical model away from one focused on costly processes to one based on health outcomes, its surgeon general said.
Comment on this article in The Forum.The Army practices "effects-based" medicine in Afghanistan and Iraq, which includes investing in such services as an aero-medical evacuation system that can transfer a soldier from the battlefield to a stateside hospital in 24 hours, said Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker. The procedure has boosted survival rates for wounded soldiers to about 95 percent as compared with a 70 percent survival rate for wounded soldiers in the Vietnam War.
The Air Force has evacuated 40,000 military personnel from those countries in the past five years on airborne intensive care units "and has never lost a patient" due to the level of care provided on these flights, said Schoomaker, who spoke on March 27 at the Defense Health Care Information Technology Conference at Georgetown University.
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