Indian Health Service to share e-health system with NASA

The Indian Health Service will share its electronic health record and patient management system with NASA. NASA sought the Indian Health Service’s Resource and Patient Management System for its integrated applications with data capture and retrieval capabilities for patient- and population-level clinical and administrative data, said W. Craig Vanderwagen, assistant surgeon general and acting chief medical officer for the Indian Health Service, an agency of the Health and Human Services Department. “NASA plans to develop state-of-the-art approaches to recording and assessing occupational health issues with this record system, and Indian health will benefit since we do not have such a tool in our existing system,” he said. NASA will use the technology transfer in its Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer. As part of an agreement the two agencies signed last month, the Indian Health Service is providing NASA with the health care system as a federal open-source application, said David Brailer, national coordinator for health IT based in the Health and Human Services Department. “This is a prime example of how the government can share technology across agencies and departments in an effort to unify architectures and benefit from other successful implementation models,” he said. The Indian Health Service has used computer technology for clinical and public health data since 1984, when it launched the Patient Care Component in collaboration with the Veterans Affairs Department’s VistA program. The Patient Care Component is the primary clinical application in the Resource and Patient Management System.