Fixing The VA-DOD Health System Fiasco

As health care plans nationwide enter the home stretch of implementing electronic records under the framework of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, and military service disability claims backlogs grow in size and attention, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Pentagon need a much more coherent approach to modernize and deploy their electronic health record systems.

Ongoing efforts to encourage the Pentagon to drop its ailing “Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application” program and leverage VA’s “Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture” health have met ferocious resistance from the DoD. But the fact is that adopting a single, joint, integrated electronic health record system is affordable, fast and straightforward.