Two health systems have partnered with Epic to expand access to healthcare for veterans — and are encouraging their peers in the industry to do the same.
Boston-based Tufts Medicine and Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Sanford Health were the first adopters of a tool in the EHR that identifies which patients are veterans, connecting them with healthcare and other services.
"It helps the veterans, and the doctors to understand the patient better," Tufts Medicine Chief Digital and Information Officer Shafiq Rab, MD, told Becker's. "We owe it to our veterans."
The health systems added a field and application programming interface, or API, in the EHR to confirm whether a patient is a veteran. The software can then connect them to veterans' resources, including mental health services and benefits for exposure to toxins like burn pits and Agent Orange. Oracle Health has a similar tool.
"About a third of veterans are located in rural areas, so this merges two missions that Sanford has: to care for our veterans and to care for our rural population," said Roxana Lupu, MD, chief medical information officer of Sanford Health, the country's largest rural health system.
An estimated 6 million veterans are not connected to an EHR, Dr. Rab said, leaving a huge opportunity to better coordinate their care and connect them with services.
Dr. Rab and his team worked with Epic to develop the API. It found about 6,000 veterans within Tufts Medicine who were previously not identified in the EHR. Dr. Rab is next aiming to connect his health system's EHR to local Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals for clinical data exchange.
"I'm an immigrant, OK. I came to this country. I'm enjoying the freedom provided by the people who died for me, who defended me," he said. "The least I could do is build a freaking API."
Since launching the API in May, Sanford Health has identified about 24,000 veterans, 10% of whom would have been missed through self-reporting.
Sanford Health is working to incorporate additional decision-support tools for the clinicians of veterans with conditions related to their military service.
The IT leaders urge other health systems to adopt the tool — it's not only the right thing to do for veterans, but it's easy and free to install. It just requires some coordination among clinical, revenue cycle and legal teams.
"If every customer actually uses this API, and everybody who comes as a veteran they identify, the 6 million who are not tethered [to an EHR] will get the help they need, for substance abuse, for PTSD, for the COMPACT Act," Dr. Rab said. "Every system can do it. Let's do it. Let's get all 6 million tethered so they can get what is due to them. We as a nation owe it to them."