Will Defense Play Nice?

On Feb. 19, Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management Budget, and Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, sent a memo to Defense Department Secretary Robert Gates; Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki; Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack; Commerce Secretary Gary Locke; Michael Astrue, commissioner of the Social Security Administration; and John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management, detailing the formation of a high-level task force to coordinate all federal health information technology.

The new Health IT task force will be chaired by Dr. David Blumenthal, National Health IT coordinator at HHS, with Vivek Kundra, the Federal CIO; Aneesh Chopra, the federal chief technology officer, and OMB's health program associate director, Keith Fontenot.

The task force, the memo said, will assist with policy development and coordination of federal health IT, as well as to improve transparency of federal government activities related to health IT and communication among federal agencies as they execute federal policy.

This all sounds ducky on paper, but since Defense has passively resisted cooperating with VA on development of compatible electronic health records as far back as the last Ice Age, I asked Kundra this morning how this memo and the formation of yet another task force would improve things.

Kundra told me that development of a joint virtual lifetime record is backed by President Obama as well as Gates and Shinseki.

Yeah, but presidents and secretaries come and go, and the Military Health System bureaucracy outlasts -- and outfoxes -- all of them.