CHICAGO – In a large, integrated healthcare ecosystem, the future is high-tech and highly accessible, “in line with this year’s HIMSS23 theme, ‘Connected Health, Concerned Technology'”. Lieutenant General Dr. Telita Crosland said, director of the National Defense Health Agency.
Crosland described the agency’s virtual priority, data-driven focus over the next three years as a “fundamental shift” on Wednesday.
“Our big data becomes smart, insightful and actionable. Data becomes a vital sign – it’s our new pulse,” she said.
This summer, the agency will choose three facilities — a hospital or a clinic — and pursue that fundamental change with technologies and processes that drive virtual first care.
Bringing care to the point of need through convergence
Crosland said providing medical care to all armed forces is strategic with well-coordinated support.
She noted that from the time service members, Air Force, Navy and Space Force members join the military and for the rest of their lives, DHA provides healthcare to millions of service members, families and retirees worldwide.
The agency manages an $11 billion annual medical supply chain, including about 560,000 medical devices, according to Crosland’s appointment announcement in January. DHA also manages the TRICARE network, which provides civilian medical benefits under military care to 9.6 million beneficiaries worldwide.
Since being authorized by Congress in 2017, DHA has consolidated, integrated, and directly managed all military hospitals and clinics, with all those in the United States wholly owned by the U.S. Army. authority by December 2021, according to the agency’s website.
Medicine, like other industries like banking that have advanced over time to deeper personalization, will deliver services in a way that digital natives prefer – during her tenure, she said. .
According to Crosland, citing the previous shift from paper charts to the Armed Forces Vertical Application of Technology, known as AHLTA, things have changed in a big way.
But it’s still “brick-and-mortar, disease-focused, and expensive.” Data entry takes a lot of effort and time, which takes up the patient’s time.
“The point of interest is not near the point of need,” she said.
AHLTA is being replaced by the MHS Genesis electronic health record, Oracle Cerner EHR, with multiple deployments over the past year, most recently in the National Capital Region, including at the National Army Medical Center Walter Reed.
According to Crosland, a fundamental shift she calls a “second wave” is underway, in which DHA is taking the military drug – over the next three years – into a digitally transformed ecosystem that will eventually make home care possible, she said.
“We will, as a medical community, reflect back and wonder, maybe with a little discomfort, about the fact that we expect patients to come to us in their most fragile and vulnerable state. them,” she said.
“The bedroom will become a hospital room” when needed. In this virtual, high-tech and “high-touch” priority ecosystem, healthcare becomes more efficient, accessible and equitable, says Crosland.
“That’s where patients move to the heart of the tech-enabled ecosystem” and others become facilitators.
By leveraging data – owned by patients and shared with providers – and converging ecosystems, military medicine will predict problems before they happen and truly enter the care space. health care, she said.
“Helping patients help themselves is not a traditional hospital competence, but in the second wave, digital technologies are paving the way.” To make this a reality, DHA will begin working with pilot facilities later this year to “remove stale metrics and other barriers to value-based care. ”
“Ideas are easy, execution is an art form,” she says.
Empowered with the resources to leverage technology, she says she sees DHA improving the care experience for both patients and their healthcare teams.
Sites will be studied and solutions and processes will be replicated and implemented.
Agility and ‘store of yes’
In response to a question about barriers to implementing new technologies and how government agencies feel like “nothing’s shops,” Crosland said her innovation team will examine whether processes and where the stress of pilot facilities hangs, which does not create added value.
The agency must also change its mind and improve its cooperation – with the Veterans Affairs Administration, private industry or other Department of Defense organizations – to become a better partner and move forward. forward. Because “as a healthcare system, we have to get good” at using data and technology, she said.
“If we don’t become more agile, we won’t be able to deliver the right capabilities to our workforce or our patients in medicine.”
While her mission is not to implement MHS Genesis but to leverage it, she says the unified health profile helps DHA achieve success. As far as “cleaning the data so it’s usable in the medical field, I think we’re in a really good place for that,” she said.
When asked about recruiting and retaining the talent needed for DHA’s digital transformation mission, Crosland said her first step was to find the talent the agency already has and bring in service members. looking to get a computer science degree into a better career path.
For example, one member of her team might not have an established title or degree, “but he’s completely taking on the function of a data scientist,” she says.
Andrea Fox is the senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
