Military stifles Web-based health records system

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Source: GovExec

Two Defense Department medical agencies have attempted to stall the deployment of a popular Internet-based health records system in favor of pursuing their own systems costing hundreds of times as much, according to congressional sources and documents furnished to Government Executive.

Defense's Military Health System and the Army Medical Department have tried to keep Army clinicians in Iraq and health officials at the Veterans Affairs Department in the United States from using the Joint Patient Tracking Application system and the Web-based Veterans Tracking Application system. The two systems provide doctors and other clinicians with real-time access to a soldiers' electronic health records, from the moment a clinician at a combat hospital enters health information on a wounded soldier until the soldier is released from care in the United States.

No such combination of systems existed before, which was one of the primary reasons the Army was criticized this year for the poor medical care it provided soldiers at Army hospitals. The most prominent case involved failures at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where lost documents left soldiers waiting for weeks to receive medical attention.

In an effort to stop the deployment of the patient-tracking systems at other VA hospitals and clinics and in Iraq, officials at MHS and AMEDD have transferred the systems' primary developer and supporter, Lt. Col. Mike Fravell, to another job. Fravell developed the patient-tracking system in 2003 when he was chief information officer at the Landstuhl Regional Army Medical Center in Germany, and created a Web-based version this past year, when he was on a fellowship at VA.

MHS officials transferred Fravell this month from his VA post in to the agency's headquarters just outside Washington, which a congressional source called "bureaucratic Siberia."

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