Case Study: Building an eHealth Portal to Support Veterans and Their Healthcare Providers
Customer Challenge
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) needed to streamline, organize and optimize the care of Veterans, active duty soldiers and their dependents by providing patients a secure one stop shop that would put them in charge of their medical and healthcare needs and connect them with their healthcare providers. The VA also wanted to promote collaboration among the 200,000+ VA healthcare professionals and the 5 million Veterans they support in over 1,000 healthcare facilities.
Delivery
ATSC implemented the secure My HealtheVet (MHV) portal. MHV provides:
- Electronic Health Records (EHR) availability
- Online prescription refills and ability to track medications by Rx number and name
- Wallet-sized medical cards with pertinent patient medical information for print
- Online appointment tracking
- Personal Health Journal, VA wellness reminders and health care information and resources
- Veteran specific information, resources and links to benefits
- Secure messaging with many VA Health Care Providers
Using these features patients can create a Personal Health Record (PHR), access health education resources, keep health journals, refill VA prescriptions online 24/7, receive personalized friendly wellness reminders, view appointments and securely communicate with VA healthcare providers. All Veterans, service members and dependents signed up as Veteran Patients can use MHV by completing a one time In-Person Authentication (IPA) at his/her local VA. The IPA is the starting point of a robust security architecture. MHV is a service oriented architecture (SOA) implementation that integrates with multiple VA systems and healthcare data repositories.
Results
My HealtheVet is a 2007 Excellence.gov award winner for using technology to enhance collaboration. MHV enables Veterans to track and take control of all their medical and healthcare needs in one place. It saves time and improves on the paper-based healthcare record model.
The most popular MHV feature, electronic refill of prescriptions, has resulted in more than 3 million prescription refills through the My HealtheVet portal. The portal supports over 375,000 registered Veterans and has supported over 10 million patient visits since launch.