VA, DoD Climb The Stairs To Interoperability Together

Leaders in the healthcare community are thinking of ways they can use data to improve the quality of health care. The departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense have joined forces to create VistA Evolution, a system that allows the exchange of electronic health records information between the two.

Dr. Theresa Cullen, chief medical informatics officer at the Veterans Health Administration and the head of this initiative, discussed the next steps in this process in an interview with Federal News Radio's Emily Kopp at AFCEA Bethesda's sixth annual Health IT Day.

"We have to have data standards that are consistent and integrated into the system," said Cullen, who until recently was the acting deputy director of the DoD/VA Interagency Program Office. "We have to have messaging standards that enable us to go send data back and forth."