Our VHA contract at J P Systems, Inc. supports critical patient care and patient safety operations. Our Healthcare Informatics team provides substantive, imperative technical support to several operational VHA patient record systems & the Joint HIE. We have for 9 years performed very highly specialized Clinical Terminology, data standardization, clinical data quality improvement, and enterprise architecture work needed to keep many VHA electronic patient records systems and Joint VA and DoD Health Information Exchange (JHIE) systems functioning properly. We also produce the drug terminology called MED-RT which is distributed all over the country and hosted at NIH.

Our Health Informatics and Health Information Exchange management (HIE) work on the VHA Terminology Standards Support contract for the VHA is very complex and requires a large cadre of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). Our work in clinical data quality improvement changed the entire world of Healthcare IT as we motivated all major EHR vendors to look closely at the CCDA messages and data they were sending to VHA and analyze and improve them. This affected 22,000 commercial hospitals and clinics who send data directly to VHA.

Our pilot projects with VHA and FDA are groundbreaking as we have designed a way to increase automation of drug pharmacovigilance electronically instead of manually. We also support patient care and patient safety functions by replacing the manual reporting of VHA drug adverse events to the FDA with electronic messages instead of faxed forms.

We have recently automated the reporting of VHA vaccine administration to all 64 of the state Immunization registries systems (IIS). Our software engineers have also made possible an automated exchange of the immunization data back from the state IIS exchanges directly to VHA. The immunization record is inserted automatically into the VHA patient record systems, so VHA doctors know which vaccines their patients have received just before patients show up for their VHA doctor office visits.

Our modernization of VHA systems, clinical data quality improvement, and interagency clinical data exchange pilot projects with the FDA and the state immunization exchange program are all critical for VHA patient care operations.  We have modernized many VHA systems workflows and have reduced manual labor to save the clinician’s time.