Federal EHR Leaders Eye Ambient Dictation, Interoperability

Federal electronic health record leaders see ambient dictation capabilities as a growing priority as it looks to continuously improve the technology leveraging lessons learned from recent rollout sites.

“I think everyone is anxiously awaiting us to put an ambient dictation type of capability into our EHR and we are working through how we can do that soonest when funding becomes available because we recognize that that’s such an important part of a modern EHR system,” said Defense Healthcare Management Systems Program Executive Officer Yvette Weber.

Weber said the agency’s joint deployment of the system with the Department of Veterans Affairs at the Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago last year “provided a valuable blueprint for future joint sharing sites,” but added the team is eyeing more interoperability opportunities.

Weber’s comments came at the agency’s annual State of the Federal EHR event last week where she also highlighted the agency’s cloud migration, a joint tele-critical care solution it is working on with the Department of Veterans Affairs and potential AI applications for clinicians.

Weber highlighted initiatives over the past year to extend the EHR to deployed military, including at locations where connectivity is limited or otherwise unavailable.

“We’re really focused on digital health. Over the past year or so, we deployed a new virtual visit capability, we call that Converge, for the entire DOD enterprise, and we are getting ready to deploy that at [Military Entrance Processing Command] and to the Coast Guard as well,” she said.

The Coast Guard is also gearing up for a few updates to its instance of system.

Cmdr. Sayeedha Uddin, chief medical information officer at the Coast Guard, said the agency will deploy the scheduled virtual visits portion of its “My Military Health” application in early June.

It also plans to deploy the Battlefield Assisted Trauma Distributed Observation Kit (BATDOK) solution on all of its afloat vessels within the next year, providing documentation for point-of-care treatment to patients.

“One essential component is its ability to work in an unconnected state,” Uddin said. “After the documentation is done, once BATDOK is connected again to the network, it’s then able to transmit information to MHS Genesis for patients with DOD IDs, thus enabling the continuity of care for them.”

Dr. Neil Evans, acting program executive director of the VA’s EHR Modernization Integration Office (EHRM-IO), highlighted the agency’s EHR rollout plan in 2026.

“We are going to go live with the federal EHR at 13 new sites in calendar year 2026, and at the end of those deployments, we will be live in an entire [Veteran Integrated Service Network]. All of VISN 10 will be live on the federal EHR at the culmination of that effort,” Evans said.

Evans told GovCIO Media & Research this month that site interoperability is a critical part of the 2026 strategy as the agency looks to kickstart the program following a “reset phase” first started in 2023.

“Going forward, implementing and choosing a schedule that really captures those natural pre-existing relationships, we believe, is an important part of the successful path forward, and that was also partly how we chose the sites that we chose,” Evans said earlier this month.