The Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs have failed to develop an adequate management plan to standardize and integrate systems to share health care information, a Government Accountability Office official said on Thursday, CongressDaily reports. At a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information and International Security, Linda Koontz, director of information management issues at GAO, said the agencies lack a clear plan after eight years of effort, despite progress made on two demonstration projects. Carl Hendricks, chief information officer for the military health system at DOD, testified that under one of the projects, all DOD and VA medical facilities are testing a system that allows the departments to share allergy, lab, outpatient and radiology information in real time. Under the second project, several DOD and VA medical facilities have begun to test a system that allows the departments to share lab order entries and results, Hendricks said. According to Koontz, DOD and VA have experienced delays in efforts to share health care information and have not fully filled databases to store the information for a future system (CongressDaily, 6/23).

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