Data Sharing Snafus Mar VA-DoD Hospital's Success

Lack of electronic health record interoperability at a new hospital jointly run by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense is adversely affecting clinical care and costing the government millions of dollars, according to a new report published this week by the Institute of Medicine. 

The state-of-the-art facility--the Lovell Federal Health Care Center in Chicago--merged two separate hospitals, and was intended to deliver integrated and cost-efficient healthcare. However, neither VA or DoD wanted to change their EHR systems, resulting in an inability to share patient data between the two systems, according to the report. VA and DoD were going to rely on the development of software interfaces that would permit the systems to work together, but that endeavor has proved too challenging to implement.