By September of this year, Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record, or VLER, web portals should allow veterans the ability to authorize the release of specific medical information held by the Veterans Affairs Department to designated providers. The electronic record, common to VA and the Defense Department, will also implement new health information sharing methodologies beginning with September pilots in 11 geographic regions, according to a VA fact sheet, which Nextgov reports was presented at a June 26 conference.

VLER will leverage the Health and Human Services Department's Nationwide Healthcare Information Network, or NwHIN, query and response standards, to allow clinical health information to be shared among communities of pre-authorized healthcare providers, such as DoD, VA and private providers, says the fact sheet. Called VLER Exchange, the information sharing network is currently being tested in five regions and following the fall pilots, VA will have "go/no go" decision for nationwide implementation in July 2012, says the fact sheet.

Another project underway is called VLER Data Access Service, according to the fact sheet which provided no implementation date. The service will provide access VLER data aggregate results for the consumer to view.

Systems intended to support DAS in the first increment include Bidirectional Health Information Exchange, VistAWeb, the Veterans Tracking Application, JANUS and DoD Benefits systems. Others to follow include Care Management Tracking and Reporting Application and Federal Case Management Tool. "It will be extended to include caching and performance improvements and at that time will support NwHIN," according to the fact sheet.

In June, HHS Chief Technology Officer Todd Park said a concerted effort was beginning governmentwide to share "semi-open data" across government. For example, scrubbed Medicare claims data would not be suited for release on healthdata.gov, because it could still be linked, meaning while some personally identifiable information is removed many of the variables of data are still associated. It would be possible, however, to make that semi-open data available to qualified researchers under a data use agreement, said Park.

"To really get down to the brass tacks of patient-centered research, it requires data beyond what's being released on healthdata.gov," said Park. "So there's a zone of data liberation that I'm calling semi-open data. There are data sets that we would never, ever, ever, ever publish as a public use file. But they are data that we could make a heck of a lot easier for researchers to access a heck of a lot faster."

For more:
- see the fact sheet

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