July 11, 2013 | By Molly Bernhart Walker
The House Veterans Affairs Committee held a closed-door meeting May 23 to discuss progress toward a VA and Defense Department integrated electronic health record. Officials were “grilled” as lawmakers pressed for answers on the project, said one attendee.
“They read McGrath the riot act,” said a source speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Defense Department Deputy Chief Management Officer Beth McGrath, DoD’s Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Frank Kendall, VA’s Acting Chief Information Officer Stephen Warren, and Interagency Program Office Director Barclay Butler, were among the attendees of the “iEHR roundtable” according to a list obtained by FierceGovernmentIT.
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As part of ongoing review by the committee, the subcommittee on oversight and investigations queried VA, DoD and the IPO on the challenges hindering iEHR progress. According a committee source only the IPO responded to the committee in a timely manner.
Rather than focus on an integrated health record, the IPO is focused on creating a “common information interoperability framework to normalize data,” said the IPO in a written response (.doc) to the committee obtained by FierceGovernmentIT.
“Data sharing between DoD and VA, and with other federal agencies and the private sector currently occurs via a collection of data sharing mechanisms that have been developed over the years,” said the IPO.
These programs include Federal Health Information Exchange, Bidirectional Health Information Exchange, Clinical/Health Data Repository, Virtual Lifetime Electronic Health Record and 2013 Data Interoperability Accelerators, all of which use different data formats and standards, writes the office.
For more: – read the list of attendees at the iEHR Roundtable – download the IPO’s response to the House Veterans Affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigation’s questions (.pdf)
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Read more: Lawmakers grill DoD, VA officials on iEHR in closed-door meeting – FierceGovernmentIT http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/lawmakers-grill-dod-va-officials-iehr-closed-door-meeting/2013-07-11#ixzz2lgivekIF Subscribe at FierceGovernmentIT
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