In February 2010, the Social Security Administration will begin to electronically share health information with the departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense to help expedite the claims processing for veterans who apply for SSA disability benefits, Jim Borland, SSA's special adviser for health IT, said, Government Health IT reports.
Speaking at an advisory panel meeting on SSA's future technology systems and health IT strategy last week, Borland said SSA, VA and DOD will share structured, machine-readable health information across a network that conforms to Nationwide Health Information Network standards.
SSA's health data sharing project with DOD and VA will follow an NHIN-based test of care coordination and electronic health record sharing between DOD, VA and Kaiser Permanente that is scheduled for January 2010.
Borland said the development of NHIN services has been key to SSA's expansion of electronic health data exchange. He noted that SSA's disability determination process has been reduced from 90 days to 47 days since it began collecting EHRs from rural health care provides through MedVirginia, a central Virginia-based health data exchange (Mosquera, Government Health IT, 11/6).