Current

Operations and Maintenance Support for DoD Critical Health Systems and Information Exchange; Including O&M, Implementation and Training Support for the Groundbreaking VLER Health Initiative.

 

The Health Information Exchange (HIE) operated by the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) is the world's largest and longest operating HIE. It is used every day by thousands of clinicians to provide care to millions of active duty service members and eligible veterans. This network of networks unites and facilitates information exchange between several source systems and data sources under the control of both agencies.

Ellumen is currently engaged in an effort to provide comprehensive O&M support for two of the primary DoD Health Systems, as well as O&M, implementation, and training support for the revolutionary Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER) Health Initiative.

• The Bidirectional Health Information Exchange-Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application (BHIE-AHLTA) provides the interface and web services that interact with the BHIE framework to access and provide clinical data from the AHLTA Clinical Data Repository. The framework also includes a user interface that allows DoD clinicians to access remote data through BHIE.

 

• The Clinical Data Repository/ Health Data Repository (CHDR) provides the capability to exchange patient records between the DoD CDR and VA HDR, which are used by each agency's native health care system to seamlessly perform health care functions.

 

• Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER) created by President Barack Obama in 2009 to offer a seamless lifetime electronic medical record for all service members from active duty through retirement. The system will use groundbreaking NHIN standards and functionality to integrate HIE systems in the DoD, VA, and Private sector.

 

Ellumen provides the same level of highly regarded support services to CHDR, BHIE-AHLTA, and VLER that we have provided to the BHIE Framework and its components for the past several years. By consolidating these efforts under a single contract support team, we are able to streamline the O&M support for Interagency HIE efforts. In addition to the daily tasking involved in any O&M effort (system documentation, network monitoring, software migration, procurement, etc.) we also apply an intimate knowledge of the many source systems, network interfaces, and known system issues to design and implement state-of-the-art software solutions. This knowledge base and leadership enhances the performance of BHIE-AHLTA, CHDR, and VLER, to improve the overall state of interagency information exchange.

Our innovative solutions focus on immediate, tangible system improvements, while modernizing HIE efforts to align with the universal interoperability demands that VLER and NHIN will require in the future.

The VLER Health initiative is viewed by many as the future of HIE between the VA and DoD. Ellumen is intimately involved with implementing this new technology, educating clinicians in the use of its increased capabilities, and supporting the VLER Health infrastructure as it is deployed in a production setting. VLER will utilize NHIN standard messaging (i.e. C32, XDS.b) to leverage the National Health Information Network and exchange VA and DoD medical information with private healthcare facilities (where both active duty and veteran beneficiaries receive a significant portion of care). The VLER Health initiative will for the first time ever provide a seamless and comprehensive medical record for our service men and women and eligible veterans.

Modernize the VA-DoD IT Infrastructure for Exchanging Health InformationEngineering Meets Project Management to Ensure Uninterrupted Operations During Comprehensive VA-DoD Infrastructure Modernization.

 

The Federal government operates the world’s largest health information exchange (HIE) between the Department’s of Defense and Veteran’s Affairs.

• 14,000 individual queries launched daily
• Links and updates hundreds of source systems and disparate data feeds for real-time data exchange
• Manages access to millions of records
• Thousands of users regularly rely on this vital information source

At the heart of this operation is the critical IT infrastructure that enables this secure sharing of vital patient information between all VA and DoD hospitals and clinics worldwide. After years of exponential growth in both numbers of users and expanded functionality a complete modernization was desperately needed.

Ellumen was selected to provide highly integrated engineering and technical management for this highly visible effort between these two large federal organizations. Executed under a multi-year contract administered and managed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Technology Acquisition Center, this complex effort spans national locations and data centers and requires extensive enterprise planning and coordination to ensure uninterrupted operations of critical systems during and after a total system modernization program.

Key elements include:

• Network engineering and optimization planning
• Hardware platform planning and specifications
• Design and Implementation of Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) environment
• System hardware, software, and communications infrastructure modernization
• Equipment relocation, data center surveys, and facility coordination
• Complete systems installation, integration, and testing
• Software systems migration
• Cyber security engineering

 

Systems Engineering Support Services (SES) for 24x7 Operations of Critical Health Information Exchange systems.

 

The U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs work together to provide healthcare and other benefits to millions of active duty and retired veterans. As leaders in the use of electronic health records and information technology, they created the Federal Health Information Exchange (FHIE) and Bidirectional Health Information Exchange (BHIE) to allow care providers and benefits administrators ready access to available health related information on the populations they serve.

Ellumen provides engineering services to support the mission-critical production applications and ongoing development and testing of the these innovative systems. The expert services we provide everyday help ensure the operational effectiveness of the FHIE/BHIE systems while supporting the daily care of our nations military personnel and veterans.

The FHIE design solution was developed in 2000 through cooperative Federal agencies (VA and DoD) and their respective contractor staff efforts. The current solution provides a “network of networks” comprising a flexible information “bus”. This infrastructure is both the “brain” and “spine” connecting multiple sources of data to the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) VA medical centers and at Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) offices. Authorized users request patient information via a Master Patient Index (MPI) from the Composite Health Care Systems (CHCS). The FHIE framework and baseline code includes data imported from the DoD's CHCS, Military Health System (MHS) Data Repository (MDR) and Defense Medical Surveillance Systems (DMSS), with regular updates to the database.

Through authorized enhancements - FHIE was improved with the BHIE activity allowing the Bidirectional transfer of healthcare data between the VA and DoD joint healthcare facilities. These enhancements, implemented at over 40 VA-DoD joint sharing sites, have been deployed CONUS as an interface with the AHLTA's Clinical Data Repository (CDR). The FHIE enhancements also interface with the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) connecting DoD and VA per the interagency framework vision.

Production-level enhancements leverage all existing FHIE technology used to accomplish the one-way electronic transfer of historic and daily updates to healthcare information from the DoD to the VA. The primary benefit of the FHIE Plus BHIE enhancements is the availability of a more complete electronic medical record for VHA and VBA staff and providers.

 

Business Architecture Documentation Project

Ellumen provides expert technical architecture analysis concerning the FHIE framework architecture and supplies technical evaluations and reports on the current environment. Ellumen will also provide expert design services to the Federal Healthcare Care Center (FHCC) regarding capacity for modifications or specialized re-use within the evolving FHCC technical Architecture. Additionally, Ellumen assists the Department of Veterans Affairs Veterans Health Administration FHIE framework's future business architecture requirements.