DOD's Post-Deployment Health Monitoring Needs Improvement, GAO Says

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Monday, November 23, 2009

DOD's Post-Deployment Health Monitoring Needs Improvement, GAO Says

The Department of Defense's electronic monitoring system of armed service members' post-deployment health is being underused, according to a Government Accountability Office report released last week, Government Health IT reports.

Military services are required to electronically submit post-deployment health reassessment questionnaires to DOD's central electronic health record database.

However, GAO found that PDHRAs were missing for many of the 319,000 service members who returned from Iraq and Afghanistan between Jan. 1, 2007, and May 31, 2008.

In April 2009, GAO found that DOD's central EHR repository was missing PDHRA questionnaires for 74,000 service members. During a follow-up query of DOD's repository in September 2009, GAO found that the system still was missing PDHRA questionnaires for 72,000 service members.

The problem was most acute with reserve service members, according to the report (Buxbaum, Government Health IT, 11/20).