The Defense Health Agency was launched in October 2013 as a joint, integrated combat support agency that enables Army, Navy and Air Force medical services to provide a medically ready force in both peacetime and wartime. Technology plays a major role in DHA's initiatives to deliver integrated, affordable and high-quality health services to Military Health System (MHS) beneficiaries and drive greater integration of clinical and business processes. Contributing Editor Steve Watkins spoke with Mark Goodge, DHA's chief technology officer, about the agency's modernization efforts and emerging technologies that will change the delivery of health care to service members..
What are your top modernization initiatives for the year?
Our big modernization initiative this year is making ready our Pacific Northwest infrastructure operations — our electronic health records [EHR] system, our network, our security, our posture, our enclaves — how we will deliver health care in a very mixed environment. That's really one of the largest ones that we're doing, getting ready for our EHR program.
[The goal is to create] an environment that allows us to easily and quickly pass data securely and safely to the right people at the right time for the right effect.
We're really looking at how to enhance that ecosystem to allow the new initiatives, such as mobility, to be actualized inside of a hospital, as physicians do their rounds. They are not tethered to a desktop computer inside of a room. So we can start really diffusing the walls of what a military health facility really means, looking at the quality of the health care. And looking at it from various aspects from a provider team, wherever they are. So if it is logistics, it's having the mobility to ensure that supplies and services are put onto a clinic or a ward in a timely manner — [showing] that we've got some of the fluidity, and the flexibility in which to meet their business needs.
How do mobile technologies fit into your portfolio as CTO? Both in the near term, in the next year or two and then perhaps out five years?
So, mobility in our platform, in our portfolio, is large. I would say multifaceted. Most people think of mobility as a phone. We think that it is an ecosystem because there are a lot of medical devices as well. And then we have to look at the difference between mobility inside of a brick-and-mortar facility or at an operational location versus mobility of patient-generated data. So we have that extended ecosystem.
I think we're on the precipice of launching into the medical arena a lot more mobility. If you have ever been to a military treatment facility or a hospital in general, there's a lot of movement. So, we look at, is the movement repetitive when we start doing our walk through? Do you have to go back to your room to get the data to log on? Or can you take that with you so that you're more actionable wherever you're are? I'm either a consumer or a producer of data. So we need to create the ecosystem that allows data to follow you. And we see the trends in Facebook, LinkedIn, things like that. We're in a very data-consuming, [data]-producing environment. And I think mobility — obviously, in our space — will probably be at the tip of the spear.
What are the new technologies you are most excited about in terms of their potential to revolutionize military health in the near term?
So, the technologies I'm really looking at that revolutionize, or make a dramatic impact to the MHS, really are home health care monitoring. We talk about "physician extenders." You see a lot of that done in radiology today. Radiology reads can happen anywhere, as long as you are licensed and credentialed to allow that extension to happen. And we're actively pursuing telemedicine, telehealth at large, to really define the strategies, the planning and operation in which we can look at the full spectrum of requirements from point of entry all the way through the continuity of care. Tele-dermatology, telehealth, tele-psych, tele-ICU are just some of the examples of physician extenders. The data safely and securely transmitted so I can make an informed decision on that data.
Another area, and it does overlap with mobility, like telehealth, is wearable technologies. How big of a factor is that in your planning and thinking?
So, wearable technologies today and tomorrow are the new trends. I think today there is a scattering of pilots, initiatives to look at. Our first [concern] is the man or woman on the tarmac with the rucksack, reducing the load of that, creating more fidelity. So we look at that, and we look at really weight as a factor. We're looking at the data, the semantics, the standards, to create a heat map, or a road map, of which wearable technologies fits into our battle space.
