The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments unveiled plans to speed the process of uniting their systems of maintaining health-care records. Both DoD and VA say the quickened pace of implementing the Integrated Electronic Health Record program will translate to better health care for service members and veterans. The agencies initially intended to have the health-record program up and running by 2018; the plan now is to deploy it by the end of 2014. Using the new system, service members and veterans will be able to download medical information immediately. No longer will they have to obtain hard copies of their records and carry them to doctors and health-care providers. Pilot programs will be underway in San Antonio, Minneapolis, Palo Alto, Calif., Tampa, Richmond, Va., Anchorage, Alaska, and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, by the end of July.
