The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of
Defense have yet to fully develop an architecture to
establish HealthePeople, a two-way electronic patient
record exchange, and they continue to lack a fully
established project management structure, the General
Accounting Office has said.
It said interdepartmental managerial relationships are
not clearly defined, no entity has been given final
decision making authority and there is no project plan
that showing resource requirements, time frames, roles
and responsibilities.
The two departments have been inching along since 1998
to set up a two-way exchange for veterans, military
personnel and health care providers. They have set up
individual health information systems – VA’s HealtheVet
VistA and DoD’s Composite Health Care System II — and
are trying to define data and message standards, said GAO.
It said that a pharmacy data prototype is underway and
will help define technical specifications, but that there
continues to be no clear vision or strategy of how that
capability will be fully realized, and in what time
period, said GAO.