Hearing of the Senate Budget Committee - Fiscal Year 2009 Defense Budget and War Costs

Statement

Hearing of the Senate Budget Committee - Fiscal Year 2009 Defense Budget and War Costs

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SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D-RI): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

In the written testimony that you've provided, you requested $41.6 billion to maintain high-quality health care benefits for 9.2 million military members and their families. I'm interested in a particular piece of that. As you probably know, the American health care system lags terribly in the deployment of information technology. It's probably the worst industry in the country except the mining industry.

And in that rather desolate landscape, the VA program is a relatively bright spot. And there have been difficulties between the Department of Defense medical programs and the VA medical programs in terms of each of them have set up various types of information technology support, but they did not organize it so that they could talk to each other.

There is now a VA-DOD health information sharing program going on. I consider that to be a matter of pretty significant priority. And I'm wondering, of the $41.6 billion, what in there goes towards reconciling and bringing together the VA and the DOD information systems under this sharing program? And what is the schedule for completing that task? And what do you need to get it done completely?

SEC. ENGLAND: Senator Whitehouse, first of all, I share your view. This is something vitally important to DOD and to VA. Last year we put together a special group between myself and Gordon Mansfield, who's the deputy at Veterans' Affairs, a great American and a great friend. So we put together a group that met every week with all the senior leadership of both departments. And we had, I believe, what we called eight lines of actions.

One of those was specifically devoted to this issue of electronic data-sharing between DOD, VA, and both directions, but to make sure we had all this data readily available in both of our organizations. So I believe we are now on a path. We have made great progress. A lot of that data today can be transferred between DOD and VA. I mean, we have moved --

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Can be transferred, or is accessible?

SEC. ENGLAND: No, can be transferred. We now can --

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: So not full accessibility, but --

SEC. ENGLAND: But we can now transfer medical records. So we cannot transfer, say, high-resolution, say, brain scans or something, because that's much more difficult for us to do. But we can all the medical records, all the pharmaceuticals and all that. So you can now receive a lot of that data.

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