DHITS 2018 Conference: The Calm Before the Storm
November 8, 2018 | Download PDF
DHITS, the Defense Health Agency’s (DHA) annual IT Symposium took place 23 – 26 July this year in Orlando, Florida. Returning to the Caribe Royale Resort and Convention center for the 5th consecutive time, DHA Director, Vice Admiral Raquel Bono opened the conference this year with a message aimed at both rallying confidence and calming nerves across the enterprise.
While the official purpose of DHITS is to provide the venue for critical information management and the sharing of innovative information technology ideas, most of the focus this year was about affording leadership an opportunity to speak to the turbulent period of change that the Military Health System (MHS) is experiencing. With Military Treatment Facilities realigning with DHA and significant delays and concerns in the deployment of the MHS Genesis, the DoD’s electronic health record, this year’s DHITS came at a critical time for military medicine.
At the time, executive approval of the NDAA was pending and signalled big changes. Per VADM Bono’s keynote, “We will reduce or eliminate duplicative organizations and systems for managing human resources, finance, health services, travel, and supplies. We will build an Integrated System of Readiness and Health…to enhance lethality and affordability for the Department.”
Bringing business reforms to DoD is sorely needed across military medicine. The Commander of the U.S. Army Medical Department Center and School, Maj. Gen. Patrick D. Sargent, also spoke during the opening keynote stating, “…MHS should look at the requirement to re-forge our way ahead as a powerful opportunity. We are connecting and enabling things that were never connected or enabled before, making things ‘smarter,’ more ‘cognitive’ and more ‘intelligent.’ Remember, what you make has the potential to save, touch and improve the lives of not a few, but billions of people. That’s the kind of opportunity we have before us… this is our time.”
This call to arms opened the three day annual conference, pulling together over 2,000 military medicine providers and IT professionals under the unifying message of “One Team, One Mission - Creating Our Future Together.” TATRC was at DHITS in full force with an active presence in every aspect of the conference: from providing assistance in crafting messaging for senior leadership keynote remarks, to hosting multiple booths within the exhibit hall, to moderating panel discussions in the auditoriums.
Team TATRC at DHITS 2018 in the MHS booth.
This year TATRC operated three kiosks within the main DHA Exhibit Booth focusing on 1) AMEDD Advanced Medical Technology Initiative, 2) Direct & Beneficiary Care Research, and 3) Virtual Health. TATRC Lead Project Officer, Mr. Robert Chewning, loves the ability to have such a presence at DHITS. “DHITS continues to provide tremendous value by providing key face-to-face interactions with our partners, but this year particularly provided some exciting new opportunities to collaborate on next generation telemedicine solutions for our Warfighters. Time introducing our staff and engaging key stakeholders at the TATRC booth provided immediate takeaways that we are actively moving forward with for FY19 and beyond.”
Mr. Ron Yeaw, Deputy Lab Manager for TATRC’s Mobile Health Innovation Center, ensured TATRC also had the opportunity to provide strategic guidance for the MHS in the area of Virtual Health by facilitating a Q&A panel of senior operational medicine leaders. “We wanted to provide the ability for DHITS attendees to talk directly with those virtual health subject matter experts with knowledge from the battlefield. Our goal was to have representation from every aspect of operational medicine: from physicians, to cyber battle-lab engineers, to MHS Virtual MedCen policy makers, to recently deployed Soldiers. This allowed us to talk about virtual health from every facet, and do a deep dive into virtual medicine conversations that had never really been done before in a public forum.”
For Virtual Health Capability Area Manager, Ms. Jeanette Little, conferences like DHITS are a perfect opportunity to get customer feedback on the direction of our technology. “Getting all of your stakeholders in one room to talk about future capability gaps, long range missions, and Warfighter medical needs is so important to what we do, and DHITS is perfect for that. We are setting up portfolios that will not be fully realized for five to ten years, so it is mission-critical that we ensure that every use case and to-be scenario is vetted by the boots on the ground assets that we are designing them for.”
The annual DHITS conference will be back in Orlando from 27 July – 3 August 2019 and Team TATRC looks forward to playing a vital role again.This article was published in the November 2018 issue of the TATRC Times.