A little less than a year ago, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs announced its Veteran Interoperability Pledge – an effort to boost information exchange between its own facilities and participating health systems, with the aim of improving care coordination for veterans receiving care at both the VA and in their communities.

More than a dozen major health systems – Emory Healthcare, Inova, Jefferson Health, Sanford Health, UC Davis, Intermountain, Mass General Brigham, Rush Health, Tufts Medicine, Marshfield Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, UPMC and Atrium Health – signed on to the pledge, promising to support its three chief objectives:

• Accurately identifying veterans when they seek care from private-sector providers.

• Connecting them with VA and community resources that promote health, especially services that lower their out-of-pocket expenses.

• Coordinating care for shared patients, whether they're enrolled in VA health benefits or not, by exchanging information about care requested and provided.

The health systems agreed to enable health system access to: authoritative VA resources for determining veteran status; automation of benefit eligibility determination and referrals; access to identify local, state and federal health resources; clinical and administrative data for quality assessment and care coordination.

They also promised to advance their own implementations of national interoperability standards and privacy and security frameworks related to the exchange and use of health information.

This week, the Interoperability Pledge got another big boost – with both Epic and Oracle Health promising that all of their hospital clients will also be able to connect to VA systems for more efficient data sharing.

In a Sept. 18 LinkedIn post, Dr. Shereef Elnahal, Under Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, announced the big news that "as of today," all of the hospital clients of those two major electronic health record vendors "can connect to VA systems to identify veterans and connect them to earned benefits."

Capitalizing on the promise of open application programing interfaces, both companies "have made code available to ALL of their hospital and health system customers allowing them to identify Veterans in their workflow by connecting to VA's open API system," said Elnahal.

He also offered an update on how some of the participating health systems have advanced interoperability goals since the pledge was first announced in October 2023.

Sanford Health, for instance, has identified 12,000 veteran patients using the open API, and is now able to connect them with information that outlines all of the healthcare and benefits they are entitled to through the VA, he said.

Tufts Medicine, meanwhile, is using the API tool to "identify veterans in suicidal crisis in their emergency room, connecting them to free coverage by VA for that care and, most importantly, notifying the Boston VA medical center that a Veteran is in need for crucial follow-up care," said Elnahal.

Marshfield Clinic too has "connected thousands of Veterans with information on their earned benefits under the PACT Act," he said.

In a separate announcement, Oracle Health applauded Marshfield's early adoption of the API code package, and encouraged its other EHR customers to download and install the code package for free and implement it using their internal IT teams. 

"Enabling data to flow with the patient through their healthcare journey is essential and, in some cases, lifesaving," said Seema Verma, general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, in a statement. "Patients should be confident that any provider they visit can access their records and medical history to help ensure timely and accurate care, and Oracle Health is working to make this a reality for all U.S. veterans."

This past month, Epic highlighted its own recent work on standards-based interoperability beyond its own customer footprint. 

"We've opened up an API so that our customers can allow patients to connect with apps outside of the Epic system," said Matt Doyle, Epic's interoperability software development lead.

Mike Miliard is executive editor of Healthcare IT News
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.