Increasing interoperability to connect care for Veterans and service members

The Federal Joint Health Information Exchange connects the health records of the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, and Coast Guard by helping provide continuity of care from the time Veterans enter the service, throughout active duty, and the rest of their life. Now that the Joint HIE has been live for more than two years, what successes are we seeing? How has it impacted Veterans and improved the care they receive? Listen as Amanda Cournoyer, Interoperability Director of the Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, talks about advocacy and interoperability at VA with Sam Lambson, Vice President of Interoperability at Oracle Health. Hear them discuss: • Amanda's personal journey from active military service to working in interoperability at VA (1:50) • An overview of a few of the interoperability solutions VA is implementing to improve care for Veterans (7:53) • Why interoperability is a big deal for Veterans' and active-duty service members' care (11:45) • Why it's a benefit to VA providers and community care providers (14:10) • What she is looking forward to improving in data exchange nationwide (15:11) Notable quotes: "One of the things I don't think people understand is that 60% of the health care DoD provides to their family members and active duty is actually provided outside in the community. And on the VA side, 30% of our care is [health care] purchased in the community." – Amanda Cournoyer "It's not just about making sure our VA providers, our DoD providers or our patients have access to their data, we want to make sure the providers taking care of our patients have access agnostic to their location or their affiliation or their health IT platforms." – Amanda Cournoyer "We're putting this data into the workflows for the first time. It's not just a view, review, maybe decide you want to copy and paste into your clinical notes and your encounters—we're using it for care coordination." – Amanda Cournoyer "That's some exciting work that you've accomplished bringing so many points of a disparate network that was trying hard to get together for so many years finally integrated as one body to support Veterans and active [duty] service members. It's truly phenomenal." – Sam Lambson