The area was recently chosen as the site of the Obama administration's fourth Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER) community, following San Diego, the Norfolk-Tidewater, Va., region, and Indianapolis, Ind.
In its VLER project, the administration aims to develop a single electronic system to track the medical, benefits and administrative records of service members when they are inducted into the military and throughout their lives as veterans. VLER will use Nationwide Health Information Network standards.
In Washington state, the project will test the transmission of patient records between the Madigan Army Medical Center, part of the Madigan Healthcare System in Tacoma, and the South Sound Health Information Exchange (SSHIE), which includes many of the commercial providers in the region.
InterSystems' health IT services that will be deployed and tested via the grant include its regional master patient index, record locator service, and bi-directional data exchange platform.
Rick Barnhill, program manager for clinical informatics at Madigan, expressed hopes the project would provide reliable information services in both ambulatory and in-patient settings.
"If in the end, we have the ability to quickly find basic patient and health data that can be used either in the emergency room setting for patients who require urgent care, or in the standard outpatient setting when information relating to patients' health is available to the contracted care provider, we will consider this project a success," he said.
