Hagel Orders DoD To 'Restructure' Path Toward Integrated Health Record

The Defense Department is "way behind" the Department of Veterans Affairs as the government's two largest bureaucracies push toward the longstanding objective of achieving interoperable health record systems, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Tuesday.

The new defense secretary said he ordered a restructuring of DoD's approach to the integrated electronic record and delayed a critical solicitation to industry — one that was originally intended to form the military health system's baseline for sharing data with VA under a revised approach the departments agreed on recently.

The restructuring Hagel described to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense boils down to "internal adjustments on how we manage the program within the department to streamline responsibility as we move forward," a senior defense official said in an email to Federal News Radio after the hearing.