Obama Calls for Lifetime Military e-Health Record

President Barack Obama asked the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs to accomplish what for the last two years has been a mostly a struggle: building a "unified lifetime electronic record" for members of the military services.

Flanked by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and VA Secretary Gen. Eric Shinseki, the president said the lack of a unified lifetime EHR, "results in extraordinary hardship for an awful lot of veterans who end up finding their records lost [and] are unable to get their benefits processed in a timely fashion."

If successful, the president said, when members of the military services retire, they "will no longer have to walk paperwork from a DOD duty station to a local VA health center. Their electronic health records will transition with them and remain with them forever."