Reflecting on Our Growth

Mr. Bill Tinston, Director of the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization (FEHRM) Office

As we start a new year, I want to take a moment to reflect on our work together. Each milestone on our journey to implementing a single, common Federal EHR is a sign of growth and community. We continue to build partnerships and expand the Federal EHR's capabilities that support national and departmental health care priorities including supporting Digital First, patient-centered efforts, tracking military toxic exposures, advancing interoperability, and enhancing the military to Veteran transition.

Our most notable growth is in our increased collaboration with you all as we transform health care delivery together. Working side by side, we successfully deployed the federal EHR at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center (Lovell FHCC). Our multi-agency Lovell FHCC Federal EHR Implementation Team recently received the WashingtonExec 2024 Pinnacle Award for Government Team Project of the Year in Healthcare in recognition of this landmark collaboration. The success of this first-of-its-kind deployment reflects many cross-agency accomplishments that can be leveraged by others looking to integrate and streamline care, transforming health care on an even broader scale.

Along with you all, we also:

• Supported federal EHR deployments, resulting in 207,000 end users at 138 parent military treatment facilities (MTFs) including 3,638 DOD locations, six VA medical centers including 25 associated clinics and 104 remote services; 109 USCG sites; and 7 NOAA sites. More than 9.6 million unique patients are in the system. In 2019, we only had 11,000 end users at 18 MTFs!
• Formed a diverse workforce of 150 military, civilian, and contractor personnel to support our mission.
• Increased data exchange with U.S. hospitals from 14% to more than 90% via the joint health information exchange.
• Adjudicated 8,532 configuration changes through joint governance to optimize the federal EHR.
• Enabled 29 Health Data Intelligence registries with 299 measures to better inform decision-making in health care.
• Acquired 46,888 FEHRM.gov visits.
• Shared 393 lessons learned to inform continuous improvement.
• Hosted four annual summits, growing from 500+ to 1,750+ end-user attendees and collecting a total of 300+ actionable items to enhance the federal EHR.
• Added 27 new terms related to military toxic exposure for clinicians to use worldwide, enhancing exposure-related care and research.
• Provided 1,500+ reports requested by end users on issues like bed inventory, COVID-19 biosurveillance, and more.

Our achievements show that we are better together. As we enter the new year, I look forward to more opportunities to work together to create success and enhance health care delivery for our Service members, Veterans, and other beneficiaries.

We are celebrating our accomplishments and growth together throughout 2025. Keep an eye on the FEHRM website for related content!