Applications on demand
The Defense Health Information Management System Program Office is pushing forward with application virtualization to give clinicians remote access to patient medical records in the AHLTA electronic records system.
DHIMS' information management/information technology solutions help collect, manage and share health data throughout DOD.
“We have over 100,000 end-user devices and the three services — Army, Navy, Air Force — have their own requirements for those end-user devices that we want to be respectful of,” said Capt. Michael Weiner, DHIMS' chief medical officer.
“That has given us some challenges," he said. "So we have looked at the areas of virtualization.”
A challenge DHIMS faced was giving clinicians access to patient records while they are in field clinics. When loaded on a desktop PC as a client, the AHLTA program is bigger than Microsoft Office, requiring a lot of power, Weiner said.
To give doctors in remote field units access, AHLTA has been put on servers using Citrix’s XenApp application delivery system, which lets them retrieve medical information from anywhere using any device. XenApp manages applications in the data center and delivers them as an on-demand service.
DHIMS has deployed the technology at Camp Lejeune, where Navy medical personnel can serve the Marines Corps, which does not have its own medical system. There are many small clinics at Camp Lejeune where doctors need access to AHLTA, Weiner said.
“We have a provider who is in a tent in a clinic in the field with the Marine unit,” he said. “We’d like them to be able to pull up all the health care information that has been recorded on that patient.”
DHIMS officials plan to extend the capability to Army, Navy and Air Force reserve units.
“We want to ensure that while those servicemen and women are on active duty, clinicians can pull their data up and document it into the DHIMS system,” Weiner said. For example, a reserve unit from Maine might want to see what care was delivered to its members while they were on active duty. “So wouldn’t it be great for their care provider in the reserve unit to see what was documented?”
Weiner said XenApp is being used at military hospitals in Portsmouth, Va., and Camp Lejeune. However, other services use other virtualization systems on the market, such as VMware’s ThinApp and Microsoft App-V, formerly SoftGrid.
