iEHR Aims To Be Agile And Open

Agile techniques have gained importance as the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments try to quickly launch the integrated electronic health record, or iEHR. With more than 100 scrum teams working at once, it's a lot to coordinate, said Barclay Butler, director of the DoD-VA interagency program office.

But the iEHR is still a unified effort that won't be launched piecemeal, he said while speaking Oct. 18 at the AFCEA Bethesda Health IT Day in Bethesda, Md. If the departments unveiled it now, "it would sit on a shelf" until the common interoperability framework, enterprise service bus and master services list were ready.

"When I've got all those pieces running--not completely but just enough to turn it on--then I can light up the graphical user interface," said Butler. Open source technology and open standards are also central to deploying a highly functional iEHR quickly, said Tim Cromwell, director of standards and interoperability at the Veterans Health Administration's office of informatics and analytics...