Whether it is a solo medical practice, rural hospital, or massive health system, sharing medical data securely between the complicated web of electronic health records (EHRs) is an ongoing challenge that both big and small healthcare providers face. As one of the largest health care delivery systems in America, interoperability is not a new concept at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). In fact, in VA facilities enterprise-wide, our Veterans are benefiting from healthcare interoperability that is happening on a massive scale not only within the agency, but also with Department of Defense (DoD) facilities around the globe. Clinical data exchange between VA and DoD has been ongoing in some form or another since the early 2000s, but a major overhaul in 2016 replaced legacy data sharing services with a state-of-the-art, HL7 FHIR-based system which makes DoD clinical data from around the world easily accessible to VA clinicians in their existing desktop applications
