Past Projects

Was a health information sharing project that allowed the Department of Defense (D0D) to share service members’ Personal Health Information (PHI) in a joint storage area also accessible by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). FHIE was an interagency clinical program, operating in direct support of the President’s Management Agenda, Initiative #14. The FHIE project was created in response to the recommendations in Presidential Review Directive 5 in Aug.1998. In that document, the Secretaries of Defense, H&HS, & Veterans Affairs were charged with improving the medical record keeping associated with future deployments of service members and the care of vets. In Dec. 2000, VA/VHA & DoD/MHS CIO’s re-scoped the project. The objective was to provide significant functionality sooner, accelerate receipt of benefits, & mitigate technology risks. DoD & VA had worked very closely on establishing the appropriate technical architecture to extract e-health information from the DoD CHCS and transmit this information to a secure, shared FHIE repository. VA made this clinically relevant data accessible to VA healthcare providers as part of the veteran’s e- health record within the VistA health information system while adhering to the VHIM architecture.

KJB has multiple resources that contributed to the design, development, testing and release of FHIE software builds, both on the VA side and DoD.

The DoD and VA Information Exchange allowed a service member’s electronic health record to follow him/her from inception into the Military Health System (MHS) through retirement and care with the VA. The Departments spearhead numerous interagency data sharing activities and deliver information technology solutions which improve the sharing of electronic health information. These information technology solutions improve interoperability enhancing health care delivery to beneficiaries and improving the continuity of care. Further, they streamline the current electronic health record advancing current processes and creating efficiencies in the delivery of health care.

The KJB Team played an intrical part in design, development, testing, release management and production operations of BHIE.

The DOD Clinical Data Repository/VA Health Data Repository (CHDR) application enables the Department of Defense’s Clinical Data Repository and the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Health Data Repository to exchange computable outpatient pharmacy and drug allergy information for shared patients.

The Clinical Data Repository, a component of the DOD’s electronic health record, centrally stores patient health care history for all service members and beneficiaries. The VA’s Health Data Repository achieves the same function. The pharmacy and drug allergy data sent from one agency’s repository becomes part of the patient’s permanent medical record in the other agency’s repository.
KJB team supported design, data mapping and quality assurance of the CHDR application.

The role of the eMI in VA is to minimize point-to-point connections and support a SOA infrastructure in support of VA distributed applications. Figure 1 depicts the current VA enterprise infrastructure and the security mechanisms used for message security. External VA service consumers that conduct two-way communication with VA utilize TLS security standards (FIPS 140-2). These service consumers communicate with VA services that expose either SOAP or Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interfaces (API). The eMI routes the messages to their proper service providers.

KJB Team joined the development contract 18 months before eMI was downsized tremendously and ultimately shut down. The IBM product behind eMI is used in a few other VA areas (FMBT & VIERS) in different configurations. eMI had been funded for 4 years of development prior to KJB joining the development contract. In that 4 years, only one data flow (JALFHCC) made it to production and only as a Pilot. During the 18 months KJB Provided Project Management over the development team, we were able to promote ICP, OneVA Pharmacy, and enhancements to JLFACC. Many other data flows (VIE & ???) were developed, tested and waiting for release though our partners (producer/consumers) many times were legacy systems in sustainment and could not support end to end testing; a requirement for our promotion to Production. In many instances IOC validation was unable to be performed due to partner constraints.

DAS is a system of middleware used to transport clinical and non-clinical information between Producer and Consumer applications. The VLER DAS project implements an infrastructure and architecture for secure electronic sharing of medical, benefits, and administrative information between Veterans Health and Benefits Administrations (VHA/VBA) and DoD systems.

KJB Team has supported all aspects of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) from the inception of DAS and is currently still supporting Data Access Enterprise Services Enhancements (DESE). From Program Management, Project Management, Architecture, Partner Support/Manager, DevOps, Sustainment and ProdOps, Quality Assurance and Development. We have supported our Product Owners and COR with ratings from them as Excellence.