Cerner DoD deployment on time; Coast Guard EHR shopping; Air Force, VA sharing teleICU

July 6, 2017 | by

The US Department of Defense announced that the deployment of Cerner’s EHR MHS Genesis at the Naval Hospital in Oak Harbor, Washington is on time for later this month. It’s a little unusual that anything this big and in the government is actually on time. It’s also meaningful for VA, as they are adopting MHS Genesis in an equally, if not longer, rollout [TTA 7 June]. Healthcare IT News

Less well known is the Coast Guard‘s dropping its costly six-year deployment of the Epic EHR last year and reverting to paper. They are not in the MHS Genesis rollout because the CG is part of the Department of Homeland Security, despite its service roots and structure similar to the US Navy. This has led to much speculation that their final choice will be DoD’s Cerner platform, although the OpenEMR Consortium has already answered their April RFI.

And even less noticed was the late June announcement that the US Air Force Medical Operations Agency and the VA are implementing a tele-ICU sharing arrangement, giving the USAF access to the VA’s capabilities at five AF locations: Las Vegas; Hampton, Virginia; Biloxi, Mississippi; Dayton, Ohio; and Anchorage, Alaska. The VA central tele-ICU facility is in Minneapolis. Doctors there can remotely consult, prescribe medications, order procedures and make diagnoses through live electronic monitoring. Becker’s Hospital Review, VA press release

Augmenting human performance in the USAF

March 25, 2014 | by

A pointer to the future is how the US Air Force is taking a new look at what we call telehealth and they call Human Performance Monitoring. Current sensors are large and complex in measuring heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygenation and skin temperature–critical data for pilots and other airmen. For instance, the USAF measures O2 in F-22 pilots to determine effects and compensate to keep both man and machine safe. Not only do they want to make sensors smaller–like skin patches–but also these are key to a new concept in aviation medicine called Human Performance Augmentation, which will measure human health status in real time. And both play into Human Systems Integration, which integrates man and machine. The implications here for civilian use are many: miniaturization of sensors into wearables, real time telehealth and machine assistance for human tasks. Performance-detecting Biosensors (Armed With Science)