Federal Health Care

Sharing of health information among the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Defense Department, and the Indian Health Service offers many potential benefits, including improved service to patients, reduced costs, and better use of health care facilities. Despite these benefits, such sharing is limited and is generally paper-based; electronic exchange of information is nonexistent, and intra-agency exchange is limited. Before additional sharing can be achieved, several barriers must be overcome, with organizational barriers being the most challenging. Each agency has its own regulation, management information requirement, and clinical support operations that will have to be addressed. To facilitate additional sharing, consensus will be needed to standardize some of the agency-specific health care functions and their implementation.

GAO found that: (1) although the extent of information sharing between the three systems has been limited, the benefits from sharing have improved patient services, reduced costs, and increased health care facility use; (2) shared health-related information is not exchanged electronically and limited due to a lack of interagency cooperation; (3) factors that facilitate health information sharing include the agencies' common functions to deliver medical care, common overall goal to improve health care services within constrained resources, and the health information systems' technical structure; and (4) to facilitate additional sharing, DOD, VA, and IHS need to overcome organizational and technical barriers and standardize agency-specific, health care-related functions and their implementation.